Neotel South Africa is a telecommunications network company. They are the network operator, catering for customers in all sectors, be it the wholesale, business or home needs. They help to reduce costs for their customers in their business dealings by drawing on their advanced technology. Neotel is South Africa’s first converged telecommunications network operator meaning that their voice, their data and their internet is offered over one connection.
Growing from strength to strength
Neotel also offers additional services like Virtual Private Networks as well as hosting and satellite services. They offer an entire range of telecommunication services, covering all the major metropolitan cities in South Africa, and expanding all along the way.
Neotel has a very strategic equity partner in the form of the Tata Group from India, bringing a united front of expertise, derived from its global telecommunications operations. Because of this unique partnership, Neotel has access to international best practices and also the latest in technical innovations. They also have a BEE partner (black economic empowerment equity partner) in the form of Nexus Connexion which has a broad base of shareholders including women’s groups, youth groups, other developmental NGOs, labour union business arms and more. Neotel also has a private consortia shareholder called Communitel which broader African experience through their different shareholders.
Neotel has invested over R500-million in capital with the intention of expanding their fibre networks to fifteen thousand km of national long-distance and eight thousand km of metropolitan fibre. They intend to link the network to the five undersea cables which at the moment connect South Africa to the world. They have also completed their Phases 1 and 2 national long-distance link from Johannesburg to Durban and Phases 3 and 4 will stretch to Cape Town, due for completion at the end of the year. This will further boost Neotel’s five billion rand infrastructure network.
Neotel in South Africa’s tele-presence rooms
The Neotel SA company also has plans to launch their third and their fourth public tele-presence rooms. These will be in Pretoria and Durban at the end of June and these will connect to the public tele-presence room which is situated in their Midrand campus, plus all their other forty five public tele-presence rooms that they own around the world. These exciting events all follow from the launch held in Cape Town of Neotel’s second public tele-presence. The one in Cape Town is situated at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. These public tele-presence rooms offer high-definition virtuality video and audio substitutes in place of face-to-face meetings, cutting down on the costs of travelling to all these cities just for some brief business meetings. Public tele-presence rooms are next-generation video conferencing, where everyone can meet face-to-face and be more effective through the most natural and lifelike video communications experience available.
Making the world a better place
As an internet service provider, Neotel has also entered into an alliance with NIIT, the computer training and software company. They will offer training solutions to students and other organisations and communities across South Africa. The alliance with NIIT was announced at the summit of the Brics countries in Durban this year. It will expand as Neotel develops their ever expanding technologies, in this case enabling education through the provision of their telecommunication services.