What It Means When Your IT Provider Holds Its Own ISP Licence
Nearly every IT company in South Africa will sell you internet access. Far fewer of them are licensed to provide it. The difference sounds like paperwork. In practice it changes what happens on the day something breaks.
Reselling is not the same as being licensed
In South Africa, providing electronic communications services is a regulated activity. It requires a licence issued by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa. Companies that hold one are accountable to the regulator for the service they provide.
Most IT providers do not hold a licence, and they do not need one, because they resell somebody else's. That is a perfectly legitimate business model and there is nothing wrong with it. But it does mean that when your line goes down, your IT provider is a customer of the same queue you would be standing in yourself. They are relaying your fault to somebody else and relaying an answer back to you.
What the licence actually changes
Accountability sits in one place. The company that sold you the line is the company answerable for it, rather than a middle party passing messages.
Escalation is shorter. Fewer parties between the fault and the person who can act on it usually means fewer days.
Design becomes possible. A licensed provider can build failover across more than one carrier for a site, rather than reselling one product and hoping.
One contract can cover both layers. The line and the IT that runs on it stop being two separate commercial relationships with two separate definitions of working.
What it does not change, and anybody who says otherwise is selling
This is worth being straight about, because the industry rarely is.
A licence does not lay fibre. The physical infrastructure into your building still belongs to an infrastructure operator, and a contractor putting a spade through a duct three streets away will take your line down regardless of who you buy it from. A licence does not make a break instant to repair, and it does not exempt anybody from load shedding.
What it changes is who owns the problem while it is being fixed, and how quickly the right person hears about it. That is a real difference, but it is a difference in accountability and response, not in physics. Any provider promising you that their licence makes outages disappear is overselling it.
Questions worth asking
Are you licensed, or are you reselling? If reselling, whose service is it and how do you escalate?
If a site loses its primary line, what carries the traffic in the meantime, and does that happen automatically?
Who monitors the line, and will I hear from you before my staff phone me?
Is the connectivity on the same contract and the same support desk as my IT, or on a separate one?
Where Global Network Systems sits
GNS is both. We are a managed service provider running helpdesk, cybersecurity, cloud hosting, backup, Microsoft 365 and structured cabling, and we are a licensed internet service provider delivering business fibre, wireless and failover connectivity. One company, one contract, one desk, for the line and everything running on it.
If you want to know whether that would make a practical difference to your business, the honest way to find out is an audit of what you currently have and what it currently costs you. Call +27 31 266 4370 or email sales@globalnetwork.co.za.
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