Retail group Spar has teamed up with Telkom and international network optimisation company Expand Networks in a R20m deal to boost the speed of the 900 telecommunications links that connect its franchise stores.

Spar uses satellite links to reach its stores and provide them with Internet access, connections to the banks for credit checks, access to prepaid voucher services, and a host of other applications.

Spar’s networks services manager Greg Hay says over the past few years the network has become clogged with employees browsing the Internet. Essential services had become slow to access.

“We didn’t want to buy more bandwidth on the satellite links, because they are extremely expensive,” he says.

He says a fibre link to its stores would be far cheaper than using satellite connectivity. Satellite is up to eight times as expensive.

However, almost two-thirds of Spar’s franchise stores are located in rural areas, making terrestrial connectivity hard to come by.

Local terrestrial backbone networks have yet to penetrate the more rural areas and Hay says wireless connectivity is not reliable enough to use for critical applications like credit card checks.

“You would be lucky to get anything faster than dial-up speeds out in those areas,” he says.

Instead, Spar decided to have the existing links optimised, using Expand Networks’ technology implemented by Telkom.

Hay says sweating the technology that the group already owns by making it work better was the most cost effective way of improving network performance.

Expand Networks sales director for the African region Brandon Rochat says working with Telkom as a partner and reseller, the company rolled out the optimisation to 900 stores across the country in six months.

“The satellite links have an upstream capacity of 7Mbit/s, but with the traffic over the top they were lucky to be getting 300kbit/s,” he Rochat.

Telkom is a new partner in the region for Expand, which also works with Dimension Data, Business Connexion and Bytes Technology Group.

It has several large retail customers in Africa, including Clicks, Mass Discounters and Pick n Pay.

Rochat says many of the franchise owners had purchased digital subscriber lines to make up for the slow connectivity, and substitute personal browsing on the satellite links. “Once we had completed the roll-out, many of those lines were disconnected,” he says. — Candice Jones, TechCentral