London - A private telecommunications line will be set up during the World Cup soccer tournament to connect the international broadcasting centre in southern Johannesburg directly to Europe.
Tata Communications will offer this international link in South Africa via the Seacom and SAT3 undersea telecommunications cables.
The overland link to Johannesburg will be through the Neotel network, Neotel being Tata Communications' South African subsidiary.
But the group needs to enter into a partnership with its local competitor, Telkom, to link the network from Johannesburg to the Nasrec centre in the south.
A large number of radio and television stations from across the globe will be able to broadcast their content from the centre.
Tata Communications, which has held a media session in London, reckons its international network distinguishes it from its South African competitors.
The group says that within the next few weeks it will announce the names of its media clients during the tournament.
The clients will be able to use a direct private line to Europe.
Tata Communications, a subsidiary of the Indian giant Tata Group, which also manufactures vehicles and steel, has in the past three or four years spent more than $12bn on capital expansion - such as for networks, data centres and related services.
According to Srinath Narasimhan, chief executive of Tata Communications, Tata has the world's biggest undersea cable network. The Tata Group also has a 56% stake in South Africa's Neotel, Telkom's only direct competitor.
Tata Communications or Neotel is involved in almost all the undersea telecommunications cables already built or planned for South Africa. These include Seacom along the East Coast, which was switched on almost a year ago, the Safe/SAT3 cable, as a consortium member, as well as the planned West African Cable System (Wacs) and the EASSy cable, which is expected to be switched on in August.
In 2004 Neotel received the country's second national fixed-line licence. Narasimhan said that the company believed it had had a good start and could continue building on it.
But Neotel still represents only 4% of Tata Communications' net income and has not yet become profitable.
Tata and Neotel will open a second data centre in Cape Town this month, after opening one in Johannesburg in 2009.
According to Vinod Kumar, the Tata Communications chief operating officer, the 2010 Fifa World Cup soccer tournament will be a first for South African service providers because of the demand created for IT resources, power, space, bandwidth and expertise. It is therefore offering everyone massive opportunities.
- Sake24.com
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