Teraco, Africa’s vendor-neutral data centre provider, has announced a support grant valued at US$401,132 to the South African Broadband Education Networks (SABEN) via the Teraco Connect Foundation
Over the next five years, Teraco will partner with SABEN to support the national drive to end bandwidth poverty among South Africa’s schools and public TVET colleges.
SABEN is a non-profit company serving the public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector in South Africa. It is purpose-built to solve the digital requirements of this sector.
Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco, said that the grant will help to facilitate the changing landscape of education in South Africa. Digital infrastructure initiatives, including remote learning and educational streaming will become more efficient and easier to implement.
“The Teraco Connect Foundation sees the grant as an investment in the future of this country at a time when all sectors are facing significant challenges,” said Hnizdo.
Hnizdo said that the Teraco Connect Foundation grant will not only enable these educational institutions to access content directly and grow their collective digital strategy, but will also assist in laying essential foundations for future digital remote learning strategies.
“To enable digital transformation, SABEN’s need for direct access to a rich ecosystem of content and cloud providers can be realised, enabling efficient connections to education cloud services, streaming, and remote learning possibilities,” he added.
Technically, the grant provides SABEN a physical presence in Teraco data centres located in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg and gives colleges direct network access to Platform Teraco, where the institutions will benefit from highly secure and direct interconnection to Africa’s largest digital ecosystem.
Platform Teraco allows for the configuration of scalable interconnections to all the major cloud onramps, 250 network providers (including carriers, terrestrial fibre, satellite connectivity and submarine cables), 50 global content providers, 130 IT service providers, 130 enterprises and financial services providers and access to several Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) at NAPAfrica and INX.
