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Helping Africa Connect We spoke to Cathy Smith about some of the ways Cisco has been helping to develop Africa’s IT infrastructure. She told us about Cisco’s involvement in the Square Kilometre Array project, an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with a square kilometre (one million square metres) of collecting area. The Square Kilometre Array project will represent a huge leap forward for astronomy and promises to be one of the most exciting developments for the scientific community in the coming years. “A flagship project which Cisco, in collaboration with the South African Department of Science and Technology, the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has invested in, is the Square Kilometre Array project. The SKA is a natural extension of the Internet of Everything in that it will bring together people, processes, data and things to change outcomes and pioneer research in optical transport and big data – and South Africa will be at the forefront of these exciting developments.” Smith told EBA that Cisco’s support towards SKA comprises of four main areas. “Firstly there’s the Cisco Net Academy and Knowledge Centre in the remote town of
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Carnavon, Northern Cape, where the SKA is hosted. The purpose of the Academy is to help local community members develop basic and intermediate ICT and networking skills. Then there’s the Optical Transport Research, also in partnership with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in support of the SKA in South Africa, which involved a donation of Cisco equipment, as well as a fully-fledged, multimillion dollar, state of art lab facility donation, and direct access to key expert resources in the Cisco optical engineering business unit. Thirdly we managed to organise the donation of state of the art, next generation data centre fabric lab equipment to the SKA South Africa project office, to enable testing and validation
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of the central signal processing architectural and technical specification requirements. Finally there was the donation of a Cisco Telepresence system to SKA South Africa and its key partner sites, providing high definition immersive video capabilities to enable and facilitate collaboration both locally and internationally.”