Sudáfrica : April 16, 2009

After South Africa was awarded the honor as host country for the 2010 World Cup, Telkom was approached by FIFA to supply the network for media coverage of this historic event. According to Telkom’s recent statement, they are on track to meet FIFA’s telecom requirements for both the Confederations Cup starting in June 2009 and the FIFA World Cup the following year.

As the Confederations Cup is set to take place this year and the World Cup in 2010, the South African Government has signed agreements and provided guarantees to ensure each event will be a success.

Telkom is responsible for ensuring that all information technology and telecom infrastructure is up and running in all stadiums across the country in time for both tournaments.

Each stadium has two carrier rooms which act as an infrastructure hub. This will provide two links to transport audio and visual data. These links are capable of carrying up to 20 gigabytes of data for broadcast purposes as well as 2.5 gigabytes for media and IT needs. Although one link can meet all requirements, Telkom is providing the second link for back-up purposes.

Telkom’s solution sees the deployment of identical infrastructure at all the 2010 stadia. This will optimize service delivery, maintenance and operations processes. Stadiums would send their signals to Host Broadcast Services (HBS), which FIFA has appointed as the host broadcaster. Here the audio and visual information will be packaged and completed products sent to various networks both locally – such as the SABC – and internationally.

International signals will be sent along undersea fiber-optic cables such as the SAT3 and Safe. All service provisioning will be monitored from Telkom’s national network operations centre. Telkom has guaranteed an “up” time of 99.99 percent.

Once the World Cup is completed, the redundant information infrastructure will be moved to other areas across South Africa.