The new team members are Fani Zulu, Executive Head of External Affairs; Stefano Mattiello, Executive Head of Enterprise Sales; and Siphiwe Ndwalaza, Executive Head of Human Resources.

Fani Zulu is a highly experienced corporate affairs expert. He served as Eskom's spokesperson for the past number of years, and previously worked in senior positions at SARS and the Department of Public Enterprises.

Stefano Mattiello held senior executive positions at Motorola and Sun Microsystems, both technology companies with extensive interests in the telecoms industry. Stefano brings an enormous amount of experience in growing and managing the enterprise customer base.

Siphiwe Ndwalaza has a solid understanding of the telecommunications sector and its human capital requirements, having previously been HR head at Sentech, the national broadcasting signal distributor.

"Attracting these exceptionally experienced executives is a huge coup for Neotel as we scale our organisation. We launched 14 months ago, and already have a fibre backbone and distribution network stretching almost 12,000km, linking South Africa's major centres to each other and the world with the latest generation telecoms technology. We're growing our network very quickly to be able to offer South African businesses and individuals a real - and better - alternative to our current incumbent national operator," says Pandey.

The company launched its international wholesale services in August last year, as well as NeoLink, a flexible national leased line product that is already being used by a number of large enterprise customers including the State IT Agency (SITA) and Internet Solutions (IS) earlier this year.

Neotel is also currently undertaking pilot services for its converged wireless Internet and voice solutions in certain areas of Johannesburg and Pretoria. These services will be introduced commercially after the pilot services have been concluded.

For more information on Neotel and its services, please visit www.neotel.co.za.