The telecoms infrastructure enabling the May 18 municipal election would be provided by Telkom South Africa.

As well as providing the primary solution catering for the Independent Electoral Commission’s (IEC’s) needs, Telkom would also service the needs of broadcasters and media channels, to keep those interested in results up to date with the voting and counting process.

Telkom said it would ensure the secure delivery of ballot results from 20 864 polling stations around the country, to the National Results Centre (NRC) at the Tshwane show grounds, through 350 Municipal Election Offices (MEOs), nine Provincial Results Centres (PRCs) and the IEC headquarters (HQ).

The solution requires access for the IEC’s Wide Area Network (WAN) through Telkom’s Virtual Private Network Services (VPNS) platform that uses multiple access mediums including VSAT technology, Diginet/Martis, ATM, Metro LAN, Telkom’s ADSL and ISDN (Primary and Basic Rate) architecture.

Cybernest, Telkom’s data centre operation is central to the IEC’s Disaster Recovery (DR) measure. Working as a mirror image of the IEC’s head office, all data activities at the IEC HQ would be replicated at Telkom’s data centre in real time. In the unlikely event of disaster at the IEC HQ, the IEC DR site would take over all activities and the elections will proceed uninterrupted.

Telkom has also provided the infrastructure for the IEC call centre in Centurion, which was used during the voter registration process. The call centre will remain operational over the entire election period.

“The partnership between Telkom and the IEC has been a long and successful one. We have been part of the democratic process starting with the historic elections in 1994, and all the national, provincial and municipal elections that have followed,” said Telkom large and government business services managing executive Godfrey Ntoele.

Once South Africans cast their votes at voting stations, the ballot papers would be transferred to the applicable MEOs, where the votes would be counted.

The count data would be scanned and transferred electronically to the relevant PRC, where data for all the MEOs in the applicable province will be collated and figures consolidated. Data would then be transferred electronically to the IEC HQ and simultaneously to the IEC DR site at Telkom’s data centre for final collation and consolidation.

At almost every stage of the vote counting process, the data would be transferred to, and presented in real time, at the NRC.

The NRC is a temporary site, constructed specifically for the elections, and all telecoms facilities are connected to the NRC through a Telkom mobile exchange, which is also situated at the Tshwane show grounds.
The Telkom mobile facility at the NRC offers a fully redundant optic fibre connection to two different Telkom exchanges. Each fibre connection has bandwidth capacity of 2,5 Gb/s.