The importance of multi-operator connectivity in SA

Tony Smallwood is Communications Managing Executive: Technology & Operations at XLink.

This means that, in an increasingly connected environment, South African enterprises need to think differently and ensuring multi-operator connectivity is one of the ways they can do that.

Large corporations, mid-size and small businesses are all so reliant on communications technologies that most business-critical transactions depend on always being connected. Point of Sale and ATM transactions and retail kiosks are such type of applications that are core to a business and it’s important that the devices that enable these services are able to communicate as close to 100% as possible.

The frequency of load shedding is putting a strain on businesses and consumers alike, affecting many business critical transactions that have a direct impact on the consumer.

While mobile operators are doing everything they can to keep that signal going, just like with most things, it’s not an absolute fault tolerant environment and there are often challenges and inhibitors that preclude them from being able to do so.

Performing business critical transactions

However, through the redundancies provided by multi-operator connectivity, businesses are able to ensure that there is always a secure signal with which to perform business-critical transactions such as payments as it allows for connected communications devices to switch between any and all available network towers.

Making use of multiple network operators have also enabled the extension of payments geographically, within South Africa. Banks are now able to supply Point of Sale devices in regions where they traditionally have not been able to, allowing for better penetration into those areas and empowering more businesses to offer the ability to pay by card.

With many enterprises relying more and more on applications driven by cloud computing or making use of an IoT or transactional application which is vital to their business, it’s becoming necessary to approach communications in a resilient manner.

By building multi-operator connectivity into their capabilities, businesses are able to provide the agility needed to provide the specific product suite or service that suits the use case of any client.

As a network-agnostic secure connectivity provider, XLink delivers a multi-operator and multi-bearer (both wireless and fixed line) communications capability to ensure that clients have access to communications technology which ensures a transaction gets to its destination, in a secure manner.

By taking the complexity out of an enterprise having to deal with multiple operators and providing the innovation to adapt to the use case an enterprise might have for their business-critical transactions, the customer never has to worry about what happens to a transaction on the back-end.