State-owned telecommunications company TelOne, yesterday commissioned its Bulawayo data centre and customer experience hub in a move set to improve data connectivity and customer interface in the Southern region. The data centre, a first of its kind in the Matabeleland region, is part of TelOne’s product expansion drive which has seen the concern investing more than US$4million since 2016.
TelOne’s data centre has a total rack capacity of 120 Racks, a total power capacity of 400kVA and is a Tier 3 Designed facility that offers redundancy for all critical components such as power, cooling, and other active equipment.
Essentially, this means that TelOne customers, who are large part banks and financial organisations, telecommunication providers, private companies, government departments, and a range of information technology service providers will, according to the telecoms company, have highly customizable, fully managed, and secure disaster recovery hosting for carrier-grade IT resilience.
According to TelOne chairman, Dr Douglas Zimbango, Hillside was particularly prioritized to be the second in line to be revamped as it is one of the group’s bigger exchanges servicing a total of 6 500 clients from more than 10 surrounding suburbs for Voice Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), Fiber to The Home (FTTH) and VSAT services from a capacity of 10 000.
Battling network vandalism, TelOne intends to roll out a fibre network and an LTE service which, besides countering network vandalism, will also improve service quality. Consequently, TelOne will give prominence to Hillside for the technology upgrade such that the client experience transformation is comprehensive from all fronts.
Part of the bigger plan through which TelOne is presently sourcing funding, this upgrade will eventually see the telecoms company deploy 100 000 FTTH service lines in the next five years as well as 150 000 LTE lines in the next three years under the National Broadband Phase II project.
Meanwhile, the Chipo Mtasa-led firm will also open doors to its revamped Client Experience Centre in Bulawayo. The move, according to TelOne, speaks to the company’s “commitment to modernizing customer experiences in all cities across Zimbabwe“.
