Vodacom Business has improved its IoT managed connectivity service in South Africa by bringing in a local breakout (LBO) gateway.

This offers businesses more responsiveness, reliability and speed, as well as enhanced regulatory benefits.

Vodacom Business’ IoT services use Vodafone IoT’s GDSP platform – one of the world’s largest managed IoT connectivity platforms, with over 215 million connections. The platform lets companies easily manage all their devices and gain insights into their whole IoT estate from a single online portal.

With LBO, Vodacom Business (www.vodacombusiness.co.za) can route SIM card data traffic within South Africa, eliminating the need for international gateways. This removes the need for data to travel across borders, and not only improves network performance and responsiveness (lower latency), but can also make speeds up to eight times faster in some cases.

The increased responsiveness and reliability – enabled by localised connectivity – is particularly valuable for time-sensitive applications such as fleet tracking, large-scale real-time communications, video surveillance, alarm systems and the monitoring of critical assets.

The LBO also helps companies comply with regulations by keeping sensitive data inside South Africa’s borders, which is important for government contracts, vehicle tracking and financial payments where international data routing is not allowed.

Vodacom Business’ latest upgrade adds to the existing benefits of GDSP, including automatic roaming between national networks which ensures always-on reliability, usage-based pricing and the smart management of SIMs to save costs, as well as real-time alerts that proactively respond to events.

Vodafone IoT (iot.vodafone.com) customers from across the globe who already have connected assets in South Africa – or looking to deploy them to the country – may also now benefit from this capability.

As South Africa moves forward with its digital transformation, Vodacom Business’ LBO and enhanced IoT platform are said to be helping businesses become smarter, faster and more secure in their operations.

• Ericsson (www.ericsson.com) is to power the majority of UK communications service provider (CSP) VodafoneThree’s mobile network, including the entire core network, in an SEK12.5bn eight-year partnership, as the CSP delivers one of Europe’s largest network consolidation initiatives.

In addition to securing sole UK nationwide core network vendor status, Ericsson Radio System products and software will also power a significant majority of the enhanced VodafoneThree radio network.

The primary vendor partnership will see the deployment of Ericsson 5G Standalone (5G SA) network hardware and software. In addition to serving a significant proportion of its mobile broadband customer base (currently almost 29 million customers), the performance and programmability of Ericsson 5G SA will enable VodafoneThree (www.vodafonethree.com) to drive national UK digitalisation through differentiated connectivity for enterprise and industry using AI, automation, and virtual and augmented reality.