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Industry:	Public Sector
Country:	South Africa
Category:	Connectivity

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Connecting Pikitup  : Pikitup
Client Overview

Johannesburg’s transformation into a world-class city begins with presenting a clean and hygienic environment to all citizens and visitors. In this regard, the city’s official waste management service provider, Pikitup Johannesburg (Pty) Ltd, has a crucial role to play.

Founded in January 2001 with the City of Johannesburg as its sole shareholder, Pikitup took its place in a society recovering from the mistakes of the past but energised by hope for the future.

It was an era of comprehensive change at all levels of national and local government, and not least in the waste management sector.

Traditionally, South Africa had followed an ‘end of pipe’ waste management philosophy that resulted in a small percentage of waste being recycled, with the remaining bulk of the waste stream being disposed of at landfill sites.

With urban real estate at a premium, and our natural resource base under growing pressure, a new national waste management strategy was needed — and formulated.

The new integrated Waste Management Policy and the National Waste Management strategy seeks to minimise the waste stream going to landfills, while extracting maximum value from the waste stream at all stages of the collection and disposal process.

The strategy also introduced a slew of rigorous new environmental regulations, designed to bring South Africa’s waste management in line with the Best Environmental Practices In the world.

As the biggest waste management company in Africa, Pikitup not only operates entirely within the strict new regulations stipulated by law, the company has also formulated and has commenced the implementation of its own sustainable integrated waste management strategy to turn Joburg into one of the cleanest cities in the world.

Current world Best Practice standards dictate that only 10% of the waste stream should end up in landfills. The broad goal of Pikitup’s strategy is to support the national vision of ‘Zero waste to landfills’ by 2022.

While it is a practically unattainable goal — some waste will always have to be disposed of at landfills — it nevertheless remains an ideal and focused goal.

Business Overview

Pikitup’s requirement was for a state of the art next generation communication network, encompassing data, VPN technology and internet connectivity.

Their current network provided for this, but was designed using older, outdated technology at an unrelated market price.

Solution Provided

Internet Solutions was able to design and implement a next generation MPLS VPN network for Pikitup to meet their current business requirements as well as be flexible enough for future expansion and growth.

IS proposed to link all twelve Pikitup Branches to the IS MPLS VPN network in Johannesburg to the Internet Solutions Point of Presence in Rosebank, using the latest Cisco AVVID Compliancy Standards and the most cost effective last mile to deliver the IS MPLS VPN technology.

The Pikitup Head Office was identified as a critical site for business continuity, and thus the Head office site has been designed with full redundancy, having a 6MB IS WiNET backup link to the primary Telco link. The design caters for automatic Failover, providing seamless cutover in the event of an outage.

Critical branches have also been designed with a cost effective backup solution using DSL technology integrated with the IS MPLS VPN solution. The DSL backup solution terminates at a different Exchange in case there are any outages on main MPLS network. All DSL links utilise Cisco technology, to offer automatic failover in the event of a Telco circuit outage.

In addition to the twelve links provided to Pikitup, IS will also be connecting 5 more branches via IS VSAT. These VSAT sites connect to Internet Solutions Spartan POP, which in turn connects to Pikitup’s core network for the VPN connection, and backhaul.

For Internet Services, IS has designed and implemented a centralised internet service delivery via its Point of Presence (PoP) in Rosebank. This Internet service is protected by dedicated firewalls, providing perimeter security as well as additional security in the form of Antivirus, Anti-Spam, Mail Filtering, and Web Content Filtering.

All the services form part of IS’ value proposition, and are full managed as a turn key. 

IS is able to provide Pikitup with three of the five classes of services.  On the IS MPLS VPN we are able to provide Silver, Gold, Platinum, Video and Voice.  By doing this IS is  able to manage different protocols on a client’s network and it enables maximum bandwidth utilisation and increased user performance.

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