Case Study: High-speed data links help to keep freight moving

Cosren Shipping, a subsidiary of China’s Cosco Africa, ships around 4000 containers a month between South Africa and far East destinations including Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Yantian in Shenzhen.

“When a client arrives at a depot to collect a container we need certain information from our head office to complete all the paperwork and release the cargo,” says Cosren’s Finance Manager Derek Clarke. “If cargo doesn’t get released on time we are liable for additional storage charges. So the data links between our depots in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg need to be fast and reliable.”

Cosren approached Vox Orion to propose a new wide-area networking solution after realizing that the network service it was buying from another vendor was both too slow and too expensive.

“Vox Orion offered a better-priced and more flexible solution,” says Clarke. “Our previous provider transmitted all our data across their own backbone and we didn’t feel we were in control. Now we have direct Diginet links between our three depots, with ADSL service as a failover.”

Once past the initial teething problems, Clarke says the Vox Orion solution has performed very much as Cosren wished. “We have in fact had to use our ADSL failover a couple of times, and it has kicked in as it was supposed to. It may not be as fast as Diginet, but it has kept the business going.”

Cosren’s IT manager is also able to manage the company’s ADSL usage directly via a secure login to the Vox Orion website.

“We have made a substantial saving since moving to Vox,” adds Clarke. “With our previous provider we were spending around R35,000 a month on telecommunications – now it’s half that. At the same time, we have a faster, more responsive, more manageable network.”