The implementation of hotspots throughout South Africa is very much on the increase, driven by demand from foreign visitors, but also from the local business community seeking cost effective Internet access given the high price of 'fixed' broadband.
Internet Solutions (IS), a leading converged communication service provider in South Africa, in conjunction with its technical implementation partner, Always-On, operate 70% of South Africa's hotspots under the IS brand. This involves providing public WLAN access at over 200 key locations such as hotels, hospitals, coffee shops, restaurants and conference centres. IS is part of a joint venture with ACSA (Airports Company South Africa) and MWEB, another large South African ISP. Under a three year deal, this will see hotspots installed at all ACSA properties, namely South Africa's 10 airports.
As the preferred public WLAN integration partner for Sprint and Orange, Quiconnect has worked with IS to provide the technical integration expertise and services to enable Sprint and Orange customers to connect easily to the Internet when they travel to South Africa, yet be billed by their home ISP. The project is live today through Quiconnect - this has given IS access to Sprint and Orange and their respective customer bases. Travellers to South Africa are now able to use the largest network in the country, with Orange also meeting its obligations of offering Air France customer's access at key airport locations. Clearly, IS benefit as increased traffic on their network equates to more revenue.
By September 2007, IS/Always-On expects to have some 300 sites and has set a goal of doubling this annually. This growth is also reflected in total usage of the IS infrastructure. Year on year, usage is growing over 300%, with revenues doubling every six months.
Quiconnect has provided a lot of value to IS, not only from an access perspective? large telcos prefer to work with a WLAN partner rather than negotiate agreements with individual network operators ? but from a credibility perspective too. Nico Pretorius, Always-On's director, explains, "When IS signed the deal with Quiconnect, we had less than 50 hotspots. They have provided us with the credibility to go to prospective location owners and say this is who we can bring to the party from a foreign telco perspective which has really helped energise hotspot roll out in South Africa.
The integration work took just over a month with teams on both sides working together to configure systems and carry out testing. In the case of Orange and Sprint, this was done directly through Quiconnect which allows users an automatic WLAN connection rather than directing them to a landing page and logging in from there.
Paul Schonborn, mobile solutions manager at IS, says, "Working with Quiconnect has given us three key things. First, we've been dealing with one professional company, one point of contact who has been able to broker relationships with two leading telcos. Second, they know all the technical intricacies of doing the integration work and you do it only once rather than three times. And finally, as they sign up other telcos, we potentially have access to their footprint too."
Moving forward, the number of hotspot locations will grow within South Africa, more countries in Africa added such as Kenya and Nigeria, and new services included like voice over Wi-Fi. In the near term, IS and MWEB customers will be able to roam outbound on Quiconnect-enabled public WLAN networks, too.
