Paynet, which runs Pesapoint, a shared ATM service in Kenya on Thursday morning announced that it would be using Internet Solution's InfoConnect on it's network. The announcement was made by Ron Webb, Paynet Group's Technical Director at Nairobi's Serena Hotel.

Paynet offers Pesapoint, a shared ATM service where several banks provide ATM services through its more than 300 branches of ATMs in Kenya. Pesapoint also provides other services such as M-pesa and bill payments through its ATM network. With a nationwide branch of ATMs, Paynet uses several Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as some providers may not have services in areas where Pesapoint has ATMs.

Internet Solutions, is a branch of South African firm, Dimension Data with both firms operating regionally from Kenya. InfoConnect provides an infrastructure-as-a-service solution through which they provide a single connection to Paynet services. From InfoConnect , Paynet services can subsequently be accessed by several ISPs through which InfoConnect service connects to.

Webb explained that an alternative solution was to have each and every ISP that Paynet uses connecting physically to its services. This would have proved to be quite complex , expensive and would have taken a longer time to implement.

In addition, Paynet gets to benefit from Internet Solutions (IS) expertise in managing such infrastructure as IS would be managing the link. Other benefits were higher up-time as IS maintains redundant links to the ISPs.

Andy Boden from First National Bank (FNB) , South Africa , shared the bank's experiences with InfoConnect. While FNB manages its network internally, they chose IS InfoConnect to provide connectivity to their 90 customers, including major retailers on Point of Service and banking services. Boden says that InfoConnect proved to be cost effective for both the bank and its customers as there was little investment to be done in terms of links and routers, much the same reasons that Pesapoint gave.

FNB maintains only two 1 Megabit per second (Mbps) links to Internet Solutions. The link has only had one outage in two years of use. FNB tests InfoConnect redundancy every three months by intentionally failing its primary link for 24 hours.

InfoConnect mainly utilises Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Virtual Private Networking (VPN) for faster performance, higher availability and security. MPLS transports packet networks by affixing labels to them rather than looking up Internet address routing tables. VPN technology isolates private network traffic being transported in public networks by "tunnelling" it.

Fielding questions from journalists, Internet Solutions Managing Director, Loren Bosch distinguished the firm from other Internet Service and cloud offerings providers. " Most of the listed mobile service providers, profits are down but revenues are the same due to reduced revenue per customer. For us, we are managed service provider, for the last six months, our profits and revenues have grown," he says

Bosch says estimates IS to have about 5% of the estimated US$ 450 million market though he expects growth in the next few months as more corporates come online. IS has invested about US $ 1.5 million so far, mostly on operational costs. Across the continent, IS has 1,000 square metres of data centre space in East, West and South Africa.

Services offered by IS are mostly MPLS based services regionally and globally and value additions such as hosting , disaster recovery and backup. Clients include Barclays, Standard Chartered , CFC Stanbic, First National Bank, DTB and I&M.