S. Africa's Centracom Invests in its Own VoIP Switch

By Tara Seals
TMCnet Contributor

Centracom, a wholesale and business-focused carrier in South Africa, has gone IP with the decision to acquire its own VoIP switch.

Founded in 2008, Centracom has built partnerships with multiple VoIP and data network carriers, providing least-cost routing for its customers. “For the vast majority of Africa, South Africa is the continent's engine of economic and technical growth—and in the VoIP field, Centracom has helped redefine efficiency for thousands of South African businesses,” the company said.

Centracom's business model is based on a wide range of clients, from SMEs to large call centers. Its developing customer base caused it to focus on growth and high traffic volumes; and to have better control over its operations, it decided to invest in its own switch.

"Once we made the decision to purchase a softswitch, we generated a list of requirements that quickly became quite long," noted Michael Aitken, Centracom's Managing Director. "Our primary needs were for a tried and tested system, built with leading technology, which would cover both our billing and switching functions. The only solution we found that could satisfy these and every other requirement we had was PortaSwitch."

As the flagship product from PortaOne (News - Alert), PortaSwitch is a Class 4/5 SIP softswitch with integrated media applications and converged billing/provisioning capabilities for both retail and wholesale users.

"We chose PortaSwitch knowing it could give us the flexibility we needed for our present and future product offerings," noted Aitken. "It has the power to give us a central point from which we can manage our business—specifically our network and billing functions across for our VoIP clients, and provides us with billing features for our newly-developed cloud solution and connectivity offerings."

PortaSwitch has a central configuration server that supports all other servers and related components. It provides logging storage for the broader system, thereby removing the analytical task loads from the application servers.

"PortaSwitch's unique architecture is a true competitive advantage. It is easy to configure initially, and provides maximum stability and reliability on a day-to-day basis," said Aitken. "One of the technical innovations we're most proud of is our three-tiered network failover protection—and PortaSwitch is engineered to support that point of difference for us."

The switch is also built to maximize efficiency for platform updates. New maintenance releases, for example, are managed via a dual software management system in which updates are received and processed in a "local" partition. At the specific time the new partition is marked "active," the server is restarted using the new version of the code.

"Our company philosophy is to think in the future. It's only by constantly looking, and thinking, ahead that we remain ahead," Aitken added. "By embracing the changing needs in the telecom field, we sustain our reputation and our competitiveness. PortaSwitch is a big part of our strategy."

Edited by Maurice Nagle