The 2013 OTEL Telecoms Channel Partner Roadshow attracted over 60 WISPs, ISPs, PBX and IT Companies in an intensive 4 weeks of national travel with the aim of building relationships and presentation of OTEL’s flagship TVNO 2.0 service. The popular NGN Internet Provisioning service over Fibre and Copper Infrastructure Nationwide also received much attention.
The roadshow was held across Free State, Western Cape and Kwa-Zulu Natal, with plans to cover Mpumalanga, Polokwane, Eastern Cape, North West and other provinces in the months to come. Southern African countries are also in the plans.
“In this digital age where business is conducted over E-mail, Skype Video Conferencing, and telephone, OTEL Telecoms believes there is value in of spending time and money to visit clients in their own environment. This allows us to understand the clients business and needs as everyone has a unique position in their location.” Explains Mohammad Patel, CEO of OTEL Telecoms.
Having maintained this strategy since 2009, OTEL has built relationships and presence across South Africa, spanning over nine provinces and having established networks in unlikely places which were well under serviced.
Project Management Leader at OTEL Telecoms , Thyson Makitla, comments. “Three years ago, we have promoted the OTEL LiTE service over ADSL on IPC. Today we promote the Carrier Grade Service TVNO 2.0 over Leased Fibre and Copper. It shows what progress the industry has made in the past few years. Channel Partners who had begun on the LiTE service with merely 10 clients, today have hundreds of clients. OTEL had to deploy infrastructure-as-a-service to cater for their growth.”
OTEL’s TVNO 2.0 service has risen to be the flagship product after the demand for a region located carrier grade VoIP Switch surged. This bodes well with OTEL’s plan to de-centralize it’s VoIP service, thus creating dozens of sub-pops where national clients are contained in their own region, whilst enjoying failover and backup links to OTEL’s Cape Town, Johannesburg and soon Durban PoPs.
Paul Colmer, Business Development Manager of OTEL Telecoms attended the last few roadshows.
”This strategy increases redundancy, voice quality, profitability for Channel Partners, and the peace of mind knowing that the Service Provider (Channel Partner) controls his own network. The costs are not prohibitive compared to if the Channel Partner had to engage with one of the major Switch Vendors. The TVNO is considerably more robust and stable compared to stand alone Open Source Asterisk boxes some of the Service Providers have deployed to handle their client VoIP Media and Billing. In fact, we’ve had a 98% success rate in deployment of TVNO across the Channel Partners we’ve visited thus far, with many immigrating to the TVNO 2.0 service after suffering the instability of the Open Source, unsupported Asterisk Servers.”
OTEL’s long term plan is to expand its network to further parts in Southern Africa whilst growing its already strong Channel based tenfold over the next two years. This will be achieved by providing much needed infrastructure-as-a-service at affordable prices for South Africa’s booming Telecoms sector, particularly in the ISP, IT and PBX fields.
“We’ve been fortunate to be well received by IT and PBX companies, and Wireless ISPs. The latter accounts for 75% of our turnover as our stronghold is the WISP market. South Africa is in dire need of infrastructure in underserviced areas, and this is our playground.” Concludes Patel.
Sales enquiries can either be made from the website, calling 010 786 0000 or emailed to [email protected]
Mike Lauterbach & Shaun Rudling- Edelnet
