John Maclean-Arnott
Chief Executive Officer
Neural Telecommunications International Limited
John Maclean-Arnott, was born in Africa and has lived in Hong Kong for over 22 years. He has been in the telecommunications business for 25 years. Neural Telecommunications International Limited (NTIL) has its head office in Hong Kong and PoP in HKCOLO, in addition it also has PoP’s in London and South Africa. Visit their website for more details: www.neuraltel.com. Any parties who are interested in Africa termination and knowing about Neural Telecommunications, please email: cs@hkcolo.com.

Africa- Fast Growing Telecom Market
Neural Telecommunications International Limited (NTIL), part of the Neural Group of companies is a newly developed telecom company in Hong Kong that provides high quality telecom services utilizing the latest Next-Generation-Network (NGN) and IPX technologies. The company provides direct connectivity from its Hong Kong PoP in HKCOLO to its African subsidiary Neural Telecommunications Africa to destinations on the African continent. Neural Telecommunications Africa has its offices in Johannesburg South Africa.

Neural Telecommunications, a New Star in the Industry
Although the Neural Telecommunications name may seem new in the telecom industry, the “Neural” brand has been around since the 90’s. Neural Technologies is a global leader in Fraud Management Systems (FMS) and with the other companies in the Group provides many innovative and highly regarded services to customers all over the world. Neural Telecommunications is unique as it is the only Hong Kong telecom company with an African Tier-1 License and also a South African ECNS license.  Neural Telecommunications was formed in Hong Kong in March 2009 and aims to provide a comprehensive IP focused suite of products and services.

It All Comes from “Change”
Mr. John Maclean-Arnott, CEO of Neural Telecommunications has been in the telecom business now for about 25 years and has witnessed the telecom and technology business change greatly from when he started. It was all about PSTN and TDM when John started the telecom business. Now it’s about the evolution of NGN and IPX technology. “We are now talking about bandwidth, much greater bandwidth and instead of only voice; we are talking of about voice, data and video all at the same time, this gives a huge improvement for the experience of the users. So, our company is very focused on the NGN and IPX Technology, the latest technology. This allows us to deliver to our customers a very cost efficient and high quality service. We are able to provide them with these new technology solutions in countries where they are not operating themselves, which is valuable for us.” John says.

Develop Business in Hometown
When asked why he chose South Africa at the first place to build up his telco business, “I was born in Africa, which is one of the reasons why we do so much business in Africa, and we have many good and long relationships there.” John replies. “As well we have a full Tier-1 Licence in Africa and operates an Earth Station in Lesotho. South Africa is the leading country in Africa in telecommunications and its infrastructure allows us to use those platforms and regulatory environment as a solid springboard into Africa.  Secondly, which is the most important is that, Africa is a very interesting market. It’s the fastest growing telecom market in the world today. Its growth was 19% last year; higher than all other countries. The growth is driven by demand and an appetite to catch up with the rest of the world. Technology makes this possible. So, what we are building is a clearing house, a network that allows our customers to connect and terminate their calls to other African countries without the traffic leaving the continent of Africa. So, we can go from Tanzania to Angola without leaving the continent and as a result we will improve the quality and reduce the cost.”

John believes that the great thing about technology is you can be a small country or underdeveloped country, and suddenly, you can have the latest state of the art technology that provides huge efficiency and far greater capabilities than the older PSTN systems.  He regards South Africa as a platform for the rest of Africa. “You need to have a foundation, to build into Africa, and South Africa for us is the right place to do that. So, we definitely have the relationship, the infrastructure, the support, and bandwidth. Bandwidth in Africa has been very short in supply and very expensive; as a result this made phone calls expensive in Africa. But it’s changing, as bandwidth becomes more available the cost comes down, and people make more calls. So, we are very confident that this is a very good place for us to focus.”

Headquarter in Hong Kong
Neural Telecommunications is the only licenced African operator who has an international office in Hong Kong. “When we go and talk to Asian customers and our Chinese customers, they are very happy that we are based here in Hong Kong, they can come to see us in Hong Kong, and we can work together and build our relationship together. I think certainly the customers we are working with who are very happy to work with us, because they can send their traffic to us in Hong Kong, and they don’t have to worry about it. We take it from Hong Kong and we deliver it for them directly to Africa. They don’t have to deal directly with multiple African operators, they don’t have to deal a long distance, they can deal with us here, they hand us their traffic in HKCOLO, and we take it from there, so, this is very convenient. And the same thing coming the other way, we take the traffic from Africa, and we can send it to our gateway in Hong Kong, and then terminate it to our Asian termination partners. So, this is very good.”

Customer is the Most Important
“You know, like any business, the most important part of any business isn’t technology and profit, the most important part of any business is to have a customer. You have to have a customer, if you don’t have customer, then you don’t have any business. So, for us to be successful, we have to focus on our customer, that’s very important. We have to listen to our customer; we have to be able to provide a good service, and hopefully we can do that in such a way that it’s prepared to let us make a profit, because we have to make a profit from our business. But it all starts with the customer.