BY CEDRIC SWANKA
The Botswana Stock Exchange Limited (BSEL) quote teleco ÔÇô BTCL this past week launched its new satellite earth station and data centre in the capital Gaborone.
The new infrastructures are expected to improve broadband, broadcast and data services as well cover hostile remote areas by providing high speed connectivity.
VSATs are commonly used to transmit broadband data, for the provision of satellite Internet access to remote locations, Voice over Internet Protocol (VolP) or video.
“Our satellite beam signals across the entire country, delivering the capacity and frequencies required for a range of advanced broadcast and broadband services including Direct to Home TV, video distribution to cable head ends, satellite broadband internet. Our connection thus brings you to the world in the speed of up to 200Mbps, unmatched in the market today,” said BTC Managing Director, Anthony Masunga.
Speaking at the event, Transport Minister Dorcas Makgato said “The launch of these initiatives bring us closer to being able to close the digital divide between the connected and not connected in our country. As the Botswana Government, we are alive to the digitisation waves that have enveloped the world and their potential to create volumes of growth and wealth for people.”
The Minister continued to highlight that investment in technological advancement is necessary in unlocking opportunities for growth and economic diversification. “As a nation we need to invest in technological advancements that can help diversify our economy to drive and enhance the growth of other industries,” she continued.
BTCL said that the servers of the Data centre will host big companies such as Netflix, twitter and Facebook on their servers and act as a second home.
“It has the capacity of hosting the likes of Facebook, Netflix and Twitter
“Infrastructure needs to be robust enough to meet the latest demands of users. Currently there are three hundred sites in Botswana with LTE, with our sites mostly concentrated in the Ghanzi area,” said Masunga.
Through their partnership with Botswana Fibre Networks (BOFINET) to deliver the FTTx network. BTCL with it`s network technologies such as VSAT will be able to deliver network strength ranging from a minimum four megabytes per second to two hundred megabytes per seconds for Government parastatals, business and homes.
The network readiness will have customers experiencing a minimum of four megabytes per second to twenty megabytes and larger as homes will be able to have access to the network.
Masunga urged the industry and Batswana to support these technological developments brought forth “I invite everybody to host their services here like the Botswana Police Service. The Data center is central to hosting of technologies, as it will connect local clouds with international cloud.”
“Batswana should not be scared of the technical aspect of Digital transformation such as Machine to Machine learning, IOT and so forth. The technologies do exist here I Botswana and one question to ask is how it can benefit my people?” Masunga said.
