TelOne to roll out fibre optic from Bulawayo to Beitbridge

FIXED telecommunications service provider, TelOne, says plans are at an advanced stage to roll out fibre optic links from Bulawayo to Beitbridge and Bulawayo to Victoria Falls.

The company has already rolled out optic fibre from Mutare to Harare under Phase 1 carried out in 2010. It also completed the Harare-Bulawayo route in May 2012 under Phase 2.

The advantage of the Harare to Bulawayo cable is that it has add and drop Points of Presence (PoPs) in Norton, Chegutu, Kadoma, Kwekwe and Gweru where other major centres can create a joint to tap into the main service.

TelOne Marketing and Public Relations head, Isheanesu Mugadza, told Standardbusiness that the company currently offers the least expensive broadband internet services via its Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) service.

"TelOne has invested in new systems hence the new services that we are now offering. These have obviously been integrated with the existing and old systems," he said.

ADSL uses existing copper lines to offer broadband internet at very low cost. "The architecture of the networks is such that they are scalable and can be upgraded in a very short space of time. What determines the capacity of the optic fibre cables is the add and drop equipment at the end of the links and that makes upgrades easy and fast," he said.

He added that the transmission backbone capacity is of type STM-64, which is sufficient to cater for the entire national requirements.

TelOne is presently the only major Zimbabwean company which has equity in the East African Cable System (EASSy), through WIOCC, a firm partly owned by a consortium of 14 African telecoms operators.

TelOne accesses EASSy and SEACOM via Mozambique (TDM) and South Africa (InfraCo). EASSy is an undersea fibre optic cable system connecting countries of East African countries to the rest of the world while SEACOM is a private venture offering wholesale broadband services and products.

Mugadza said download speed is up to 2Mbps (Megabytes per second) and upload is up to 512Kbps (Kilobytes per second) with an unlimited monthly data cap.

"Securing technical partners is but one way of modernising TelOne's networks.

TelOne is currently implementing projects from own generated funds as we migrate to new technologies and certainly external funds will assist to speed up the process as required by all businesses the world over," he said.

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