INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cabling
The economic effect could
have been much worse
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P
aratus Group CEO Barney Harmse has
spoken about the latest outages in
Namibia as a result of maintenance on
the WACS undersea cable in Swakopmund.
He was transparent about the impact on
and extent of the network and the technical
expertise of the Paratus team across the
African operations.
“We remain cognisant that Paratus is not
only a local operator, but an operator on
a pan-African scale,” said Harmse. “It is
therefore prudent to mention that if we
did not have a future investment goal for
the network across Africa, as we have been
doing, this maintenance would have had a
crippling effect on Namibia, its businesses
and the economy as a whole.”
He clarified that the redundant routes
available on the network alleviated the
flow of traffic and also confirmed that a
further bottleneck on these routes could
have had a massive impact on the entire
communications and ICT industry. The
knock-on effect would have created a
detrimental degradation of service to
enterprises in the country.
Paratus has invested hundreds of millions
of dollars in redundant routes across the
continent, which has been part of the
saving grace during the WACS Maintenance
timeframe and that better network planning
lessons were learnt during the process. New
and alternative measures have already been
put in place to safeguard the network for
future challenges.
“I have to praise the technical resources
we have employed across our African
operations and also the depth of
experience they have,” said Harmse.
“Their ongoing capability to manage the
network and especially the crisis-managing
www.intelligentcio.com
Paratus Group CEO, Barney Harmse
resilience they have displayed, has shown
extraordinary ingenuity.”
Responding to the issue regarding their
plans to safeguard the future of the
network, Harmse explained that the
network is like an Active Dynamic organism.
“Adding a new route for redundancy or
new development needs to be part of a
fully inclusive architectural design,” he
said. “There are various factors one has
to take into consideration such as the
age of the network, how the network was
‘architectured’ and how it is managed. On
various fronts and concurrently with other
countries, Paratus has and will continue its
unconditional investment plans across the
region. The question is not whether portions
of the network will go down, which is a
reality worldwide, it’s about how you react
when the challenge is in front of you. We
built our network accordingly, because we
have a purpose and a cause to achieve.”
Harmse added that private operators
play in a very distinct space and have a
supporting role to play in the ICT segment
across the continent.
“We cannot expect governments to do
everything, irrespective of the challenges
that they face, regardless of budget
constraints or technical resource challenges
that may present itself,” he said.
“Paratus is a private operator, we have
to play an active role in supporting
governments because they cannot do
everything themselves. In Namibia, as
one example, we manage more than
40% of the country’s GDP across various
industry segments.
“We have a purpose, a goal, an objective
to achieve and we do this to safeguard
the network and provide our clients with a
seamless network experience across Africa.” n
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