Providing Internet services in South Africa is a difficult and expensive process. Expectations on the actual capability of broadband in South Africa can’t be supported by the local infrastructure. Only a few years ago it was possible to deliver VPN or VoIP services over a cheap ADSL line; it was even possible to use ADSL as an alternative to low speed point-to-point Diginet. Lately, however, as data traffic has increased, so the quality of these ADSL-based services has deteriorated.

VoIP is in high demand now because of the immense cost savings it yields on telephone bills. However, VoIP requires a very low latency (i.e. transmission delay) otherwise you end up with broken and delayed speech and a poor quality call. ADSL links cannot support this consistently.

Businesses disillusioned with receiving "Best Effort" performance from the big internet service providers (when promised guaranteed service speeds) are looking for alternatives to the "one size fits all" solution of ADSL. Vlocity’s experience as a wireless-only provider means that it can achieve efficiencies in distribution and management of services that yield better performance. Vlocity customises its services and provides exactly the type of connectivity required by its clients.

We firmly believe that link and service customisation is the best possible way to deliver the quality of connectivity that our clients need. We have a range of alternative strategies to achieve this and work together with our clients to create competitive suites of services that will save them money and achieve their connectivity goals.

An example of this is our VoIP Service. Instead of breaking out through the internet, we are directly connected to VoIP providers via our own network. This means that our VoIP clients are actually connecting directly to the VoIP provider’s server via our　intranet, bypassing the internet completely. This ensures that we can manage and guarantee quality of service actively and independently.

The same idea applies to virtual private networks (VPN). VPN is not something that can run reliably on a regular broadband link, because broadband is asymmetric with a slow upload component and a fast download component. Since VPN is a two way protocol, the speed of the VPN will be limited to the upload speed only - and it’s impossible to maintain even that speed all of the time because broadband is a shared (contended) service.

A 64kbps VPN connection can be guaranteed over a wireless broadband connection, as this is the minimum speed we offer in both directions on our point-to-point (PtP) links. We’re confident that no broadband service can achieve this performance for VPN.