Subcategoría: Actitud de los niños ante la pregunta pedagógica y la expresión oral.

In 1997, the PTO, Telkom was issued a license to provide all public switched telecommunications services for a minimum of 25 years, including an exclusivity period of five years which ended May 2002. Under this license Telkom is authorized to provide national long distance telecommunications services, international

telecommunications services, local access telecommunication services and public pay telephone services.

In 1997, Telkom began an extensive five year capital investment program with total fixed-line investment for the five years ending March 31, 2002 at R41.7 billion, of which R27.9 billion was for network modernization and line roll-out in order to comply with license obligations and to prepare for competition. Telkom has recently implemented a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) network which terminates calls of international voice carriers into its fixed-line network. The network can terminate more than sixty media gateways, or 21,000 voice circuits, and is presently transit switching VOIP calls to four African countries.

A marine fibre optic cable connecting South Africa to Europe was established by Telkom in 1980s (SAT-2) but is now fully utilised at 1Gbps. As part of an upgrade and broader strategy to become a hub for Africa, Telkom invested approximately $85 million in the SAT-3/WASC/SAFE submarine cable system. The 28 800km cable is a combination of two distinct projects, the South African/Far East (SAFE) cable, which connects Cape Town to India and Malaysia via Mauritius, and the SAT-3/West African Submarine Cable (WASC), which links Portugal to SA, with landing points in eight Afric an countries along the way. Telkom has the right to approximately 20% of the combined capacity on the cable system, making it the largest capacity owner out of the 36 telecommunications operators which invested a total of over $650 million in the project.

Telkom has been upheld as the sole reseller of the cable's capacity in South Africa. While Sentech and the forthcoming SNO are the only other parties that are allowed to resell access to the cable, efforts by Sentech to obtain wholesale access to SAT-3 have not been successful and it has instead elected to use satellite bandwidth for its

international traffic.

In 2002 the first facilities-based competition was introduced in South Africa when an international carrier of carriers license and multimedia license was issued to Sentech, the government parastatal provider of broadcasting signal distribution services. This allows Sentech to provide international connectivity to the other licensed

telecommunication operators, and to provide multimedia data services directly to end users. Prior to this it provided satellite downlink services for some Internet operators and consumers via a subsidiary company called Infosat. Sentech has some 500 television transmitter towers, which carry various TV, FM, medium and short-wave and satellite services.

A process to establish a second national operator (SNO) to provide public switched telecommunications services began in 2002 and it was expected that licenses would be issued in 2003 or early 2004, however, the solicitation of applications for the SNO licenses was not well received by prospective domestic and international telephone service providers. Government initially said that the telecommunication divisions of the electricity parastatal, Eskom, and the diversified transport parastatal, Transnet, would form 30% of the SNO, with 51% owned by an international strategic partner and the remaining 19% by black empowerment groups.

Transtel is the telecommunication subsidiary of South Africa's government owned transport, shipping and rail parastatal corporation, Transnet, which is still expected to form part of the SNO. Transtel operates leased lines, VSAT, microwave transmission, a fibre optic network, satellite bandwidth, an x.25 packet switched network, frame relay and ATM. It is the largest network in the Southern Hemisphere after Telkom and is interconnected with Telkom's infrastructure. Although it has no terrestrial infrastructure outside of South Africa as yet, Transnet has leased transponders on various satellites which allow it to use C-Band and KU-Band VSAT technology to connect to other countries and to remote areas inside South Africa.

Eskom is South Africa's national electricity supplier which maintains a telecommunications network that services the organisation's communications

requirements and will also form part of the SNO along with Transtel. Although much of Eskom'sbackbone is currently based on microwave links, Eskom is installing fibre optic cable down all new cables laid, in a project called South African Fibre Optic Network (SAFON) in major cities and industrial areas which includes a backbone network, access network and terminal equipment in metropolitan areas. Links also extend to Botswana, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. The grid is expected to expand into a continent-wide network in the longer term as projects to tap the electricity generation potential of the Congo come on stream. Eskom has a subsidiary company focussed on telecommunication, which is also active in the rest of Africa.

It is expected that a license will be issued shortly in which the government will hold a 25% stake directly and 30% indirectly through Eskom Enterprises and Transtel, and the remainder being held by black empowerment partner Nexus, and the winning consortia Communitel and 2 Consortium. Telkom is required to allow the second national operator to use all of its telecommunications facilities for the first two years of its license, on a sharing basis, for the purpose of providing public switched telecommunication services. This would include access to SAT-3 however policy matters in relation to Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) still have to be addressed, and it is expected that once this dispensation lapses, Telkom is likely to exercise its rights to exclusivity over its own infrastructure.

Twenty-seven areas were identified as having less than 5% teledensity and 7 of these were subsequently selected for special 'Under Serviced Area Licenses (USALs) and 4

winners have so far been selected, with the remaining three still pending. The bidders that were recommended are: Bokone Telecomms (Limpopo, Capricorn District); Thinta Thinta Telecoms (KwaZulu-Natal, Ugu District); Kingdom Communications (KZN, Zululand District); and Ilizwe Telecoms (Eastern Cape, OR Tambo

Municipality). Also in the Eastern Cape, in the Amatole District, Amatole Communications was recommended, pending the finalisation of the merger discussions with Uqalo consortium members.

VSAT solutions have been deployed extensively in South Africa since the products first became available in the country during 1994, but their use is restricted by law in terms of who may offer these services and for what purposes. Only Telkom may use them without restriction. Although transport parastatal Transnet s communications arm Transtel offers extensive satellite services using VSAT in the rest of Africa, until the SNO of which it is part is licensed, it may not offer these services in South Africa9. Sentech s use of VSAT also has a restraint on the offering of voice services. Telkom now has in use over 5000 VSAT stations around the country, and has launched a satellite-based DSL service which utilises VSAT technology.

Telkom is in the process of on migrating all of its data networks onto an

asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. About 200 corporate customers were connected to the network. The present available bandwidth between the core switches is 49 STM-1s or 7.3 Gbit/s, while the available bandwidth between the core switches and the services access switches is 207 STM-1s or 30.8 Gbit/s.

A2.12 Sudan

Sudan has an extensive network of about 500 000 fixed lines and 650 000 mobile subscribers at the end of 2003 linked via a national fibre optic backbone which it continues to extend. This backbone spans over 5000-km, linking Khartoum with Karma in the north; Port Sudan and Sawakin on the eastern seaboard; Sinnar, Addamazeen, and Kinanah in the east and south; and Al Genana in the west. International links are made to Egypt through Karma in the north, Saudi Arabia via Port Sudan, Ethiopia, and Chad via Al Genana. In addition, Sudatel has extensive domestic satellite network, with about 70 VSAT earth stations deployed around the country.

Sudatel increased the capacity of its international voice gateway by 48% between 2000 and 2001, from 1,403 international circuits to 2,082. 345 of these circuits were with Intelsat and 1,737 were with Arabsat. Sudanet in addition has procured satellite- based upstream international Internet capacity through the German firm Spaceline.

Sudatel and Saudi Telecommunications Corporation (STC) have also implemented a 1.2 Terabit submarine cable connecting the two countries, from Port Sudan to Jeddah (Saudi Arabia). Global Marine Systems and BT are the initiators of this system, and a joint venture company Arab Cables Company was created between the Saudi

authorities, the Arab Investment Company and Sudatel which holds a 40% stake.

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When Transtel was included in the winning bid to establish a network for the national Lottery 2 years ago, it began to install its own equipment, but objections by Telkom led to it having to give the network to Telkom and lease capacity on it.

Sudatel retains the monopoly on international services until 2005. New service providers are therefore dependent on interconnecting to Sudatel for international voice traffic (including cellular operators) and upstream international Internet

bandwidth (for ISPs). Sudatel was privatised in 1999, and the state has sold off further tranches in the telco, and has since reduced its shareholding to 39%.

Given its central position, Sudatel is also important to the realization of the COMTEL project which will provide onward connectivity to submarine cables landing in Egypt and Djibouti.