BonCom (Pty) Ltd Chief Executive, Preddy Mothopeng, said his firm was seeking a tie-up with TelOne before the end of the year.
“There are some telecom deals we are trying to tie up. During this visit we have engaged TelOne and Powertel as well as a few other telecommunication companies with a view to investing,” he said. “South Africa has a lot of money to invest in Zimbabwe and our coming in at this particular time will help give confidence to international investors.”
Mothopeng, who was in the country as part of the 40 South African companies in the fourth South Africa-Zimbabwe Trade and Investment initiative, said he was looking to return to Zimbabwe over the next month to further negotiations.
The Johannesburg-based BonCom is largely involved in information communication technology outsourcing. South African Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Vusi Mavimbela, has since urged Zimbabwean and South African firms to set up joint-venture partnerships and engage South African financial institutions with “bankable projects.”
TelOne is Zimbabwe’s sole fixed lined telephone operator, and Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority figures as at June this year showed that the company had 346 211 subscribers.
Earlier this year, TelOne was in talks with its South African counterpart, Telkom SA, over a possible tie-up but the negotiations flopped.
At the time, observers noted that the company’s huge debt – part of which includes $28 million owed to a Dutch bank – was a major put-off. It had also been reported that Indian state-controlled telecoms company, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, was reportedly eyeing a 51 percent stake in TelOne.
Last month TelOne announced the introduction of an SHDSL service. SHDSL is an acronym for Single-pair High-speed Digital Subscriber Line, a variant of the DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) technology that, so far, TelOne had only offered through an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line.
The essential difference between SHDSL and ADSL is the bandwidth capacity allocated upstream (from the user to TelOne) and downstream (from TelOne to the user) traffic. SHDSL supports the same data transfer rate for sending and receiving data while the ADSL upstream pipeline is much smaller than the downstream.
This makes their newest service offering suitable for business use as business applications usually have large volumes of data traffic traveling both ways.
Post published in: Africa News