Phone (News - Alert) line theft in South Africa is on the rise. South Africa's primary telephone vendor, Telkom, is losing around $2.4 million a month to phone line thieves. Drawn by the promise of copper contained in the lines, the thieves are making off with astonishing sums and making communications a lot harder than they should be. But alternatives in the Voice over IP (VoIP) market are about to make life harder for the thieves by reducing what's available to steal in the first place.

The stakes are unbearably high; during the 2010 - 2011 fiscal year Telkom spent around $48 million on repairs, and over the last four years, has lost $241 million in just phone line theft. But with VoIP, in many cases, there are no lines at all.

One company, BitCo, offers what it calls "invisible lines" to companies, an approach that involves sending voice data via a series of radio waves in a standard known as Metro E. Metro E is rapidly becoming the standard for South African communications. It's not just the incredible theft resistance that keeps users working with Metro E, but also its carrier-grade bandwidth quality and capacity to help businesses recover in the wake of an emergency or disaster. BitCo has taken things one step further to not only offer the Metro E signal, but also a disaster recovery ring built right in.

BitCo's sales director, Michael Colin, explains the disaster recovery ring service as a way to keep numbers for life, no matter where the company decides to locate. If service were to go down in, say, Johannesburg, traffic could be quickly-seamlessly, according to BitCo--rerouted to Pretoria and keep the company up and operating.

BitCo's not alone in this field, either, with companies like MIA Telecoms--who also happens to be South Africa's sole distributor of Samsung (News - Alert) telecommunication and PABX hardware--bringing in a full all-in-one solution that includes IP telephony, mobile use, customer contact systems and more.

It's impressive to see how private enterprise in South Africa is taking what could have been a disastrous set of circumstances and has instead developed them into a robust wireless networking solution that's offering everything that the original copper line could offer and then some. Hopefully Telkom will also get in on the action and set up its own wireless systems and completely remove the threat of copper line theft in South Africa.

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