October 18, 2006
By Anish Abraham
IT has taken just under a year for the City of Johannesburg to wean its information technology (IT) systems off Telkom lines and on to its own wireless broadband network – making the headlines.
According to Herklaas du Plessis, the deputy-director for IT, almost all of the council's buildings are connected to the wireless network. "There might be one or two left, but we have cancelled our fixed data lines," he said.
Although Johannesburg was the first local government authority to get a licence to run its own wireless network, it was not the first to implement such a network. However, Du Plessis said the attempts by other municipalities to create their own networks were found to be illegal by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), the industry regulator.
Herklaas du Plesis, Deputy Director of IT: Communication Technology with a wireless LAN access point
"We applied for a private telecommunications network licence and radio frequency spectrum licence, and they were approved in December 2004."
The licence allows the City to use the Hyper-LAN band frequency for internal communications. Microwave repeaters are placed at high points, like water towers, to which smaller dishes on individual buildings have a direct line-of-sight.
Masana Technologies, the City's IT outsourcing partner, in partnership with Multisource Telecoms, will ensure that the entire 1 600 square kilometres of the metro eventually will be covered.
Moving the City's systems off a conventional 64-kilobit Telkom fixed line on to a 100 megabit per second microwave link means individual users have access to more bandwidth than previously.
"Due to good bandwidth available, all the City's servers can also be moved to a centralised location," Du Plessis added.
The wireless network also ensures that the City benefits through not having to pay service charges; in addition, it needs less physical infrastructure.
"Once the capital costs of installation are paid up, there are no more line charges, which is not the case with fixed lines. Also, with wireless systems, there is no need for a fixed wall socket to connect to the network, while a single wireless access unit also supports up to 30 connections," Du Plessis explained.
The City normally spent up to R3,5-million a month on its bills for fixed data lines – through switching to its own network, it has seen a return on investment in less than four months. Maintenance and service costs of the wireless network are expected to be about R2-million a year.
Du Plessis added that a pilot to add the City's utilities, agencies and corporatised entities to the wireless network had just concluded and his department would now proceed with that phase of the project.
"However, since they are different entities with their own IT and security systems, we are looking at creating separate virtual private networks for each one of them, while still sharing the same physical infrastructure," he said.
Together with the municipalities of Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, Joburg is piloting the network in schools, thus promoting the provincial government's Gauteng Online concept.
"The most exciting part is that the council has recently approved that we can now look into providing similar services for end users – that is customers of the municipality – and we will now look into implementing that phase of the project," he concluded.
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