Telkom – South African telecommunications company partly owned by the government – opened a new data center in Bellville, a Cape Town suburb. The facility is part of the company's strategy of expansion in the market of converged IT and telecommunications, according to a report by TechCentral.

Pierre Marais – the company's managing director of data center operations – told the South African news agency that the data center was “an important weapon in the arsenal” of service providers fighting it out on the “next battleground” convergence of IT and telecommunications had created.

The new data center (second one in Bellville) is Telkom's sixth hosting facility. The other four are in Gauteng – about 900 miles northwest of Bellville, near Johannesburg.

The facility is carrier-neutral – an uncommon model in the South African market until recently. Private provider Teraco said in August it was the only carrier-neutral data center provider in the country.

Bellville is close to Telkom's intercontinental submarine cable landing in Melkbosstrand. Until very recently, the company owned the only cable that connected Sub-Saharan Africa to the rest of the world. The country's second intercontinental cable operator Seacom lit its fiber up in August of 2009.