Since 2009, OTEL has been pursuing the strategy of building relationships and presence across South Africa, spanning nine provinces, and has established networks in unlikely and underserviced places. To continue this mission, this year OTEL Telecoms organized a four week national roadshow that was attended by over 60 WISP, ISP, PBX (News - Alert) and IT companies. The agenda of the roadshow was to build new relationships and present OTEL’s TVNO 2.0 service. 

The roadshow was held across the Free State, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Polokwane, Eastern Cape, and North West, with other provinces to be covered in coming months. Other southern African countries are also in the plans.

“In this digital age where business is conducted over e-mail, Skype (News - Alert) videoconferencing and telephone, OTEL Telecoms believes there is value in spending time and money to visit clients in their own environment. This allows us to understand the clients’ business and needs as everyone has a unique position in their location,” explained Mohammad Patel, CEO of OTEL Telecoms, in a statement.

Growing demand for a regional carrier grade VOIP switch has helped OTEL’s TVNO 2.0 service become a flagship product. This goes well with OTEL’s strategy to decentralize its VOIP service, thus creating dozens of sub-POPs, with national clients contained in their own region, while leveraging OTEL’s Cape Town, Johannesburg as failover with backup links.

Paul Colmer, business development manager of OTEL Telecoms, attended the last few roadshows.

“This strategy increases redundancy, voice quality, profitability for channel partners, and the peace of mind knowing that the service provider (channel partner) controls his own network. The costs are not prohibitive compared to if the channel partner had to engage with one of the major switch vendors,” he said.  “The TVNO is considerably more robust and stable compared to standalone open source Asterisk (News - Alert) boxes some of the service providers have deployed to handle their client VOIP media and billing. In fact, we’ve had a 98% success rate in deployment of TVNO across the channel partners we’ve visited thus far, with many migrating to the TVNO 2.0 service after suffering the instability of the open source, unsupported Asterisk servers.”

Over the long term, OTEL plans to expand its network to other parts of southern Africa, while growing its already strong channel base tenfold over the next two years. To achieve this, company will be providing infrastructure-as-a-service at affordable prices for South Africa’s booming telecoms sector, particularly in the ISP, IT and PBX fields.

“We’ve been fortunate to be well received by IT and PBX companies, and wireless ISPs. The latter account for 75% of our turnover, as our stronghold is the WISP market. South Africais in dire need of infrastructure in underserviced areas, and this is our playground,” concluded Patel.