MTN's converged IP network in southern Africa is not only one of the most distinctive on the continent, but one of the most robust, offering extensive coverage and connectivity between multiple peering points, locally and internationally.

The MTN network has three international peering ports - London, Amsterdam and New York - which transmit over direct fibre circuits to our core nodes across Africa's major metropolitan areas (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Kenya); almost all offering guaranteed redundancy with multiple/dual breakout points. The international fibre circuits are constructed over the SAT3 (Southern Africa Trunk 3) and SAFE (Southern Africa Far East) cable systems, with investments by MTN in both the Seacom and Eassy cables to further drive redundancy and improve our customers' service availability and reliability.

Built on a layered principle and consisting of a transmission backbone, core, gateway and access layer; the network offers customers a truly reliable, redundant service that is wholly maintained and managed by MTN rather than outsourced or co-managed by alternate service providers. Within South Africa, the transmission backbone layer is built on an ATM and Ethernet national backbone, which ensures that the high availability and redundancy provided by the backbone's core and diverse fibre routes, extends into MTN network nodes.

Recent network expansion advancements of STM 4's (to compliment the existing STM 1's & DS3's), allows us to improve upon already optimum levels of capacity and availability for our customers and ensures the rapid delivery of bandwidth to meet any unexpected growth in demand.

For many years, MTN has deployed a technology called Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) over the network to ensure an exceptional and highly consistent customer experience. MPLS traffic engineering enables us to dynamically optimise network resource utilisation and traffic performance. For example, we can control and direct specific routes across the network to reduce congestion and improve the cost and efficiency of carrying IP traffic. MPLS technology also ensures that our customers can link their national-based sites within our core network hosting - providing real-time operational optimisation. MPLS empowers us to deliver third generation network services to our customers who require either IP based MPLS VPN's and/or specific Quality of Service (QoS) based on anything from cost of service to IP application service requirements.

Additional network services include hosting facilities, domain name services (DNS), mail services (such as SMTP and POP3), traffic management and engineering services, Voice over IP, managed security, router configuration and extensive server and services monitoring. MTN pays particular attention to monitoring service level agreements to ensure that we consistently meet our commitments and exceed our customers' expectations.