FTTH - from petition to deployment.

charlieharper

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I live on the KZN South Coast (Scottburgh), where our internet options are very much limited compared to those in the cities.

About 3 years ago, our Telkom copper lines repeatedly got stolen and from what I know, Telkom is now replacing clients with LTE instead. We switched over to Rain LTE back in 2018 (220gb + 220gb + rollover package from Afrihost) and was extremely happy with it, but over the last 4 months service have deteriorated significantly, I assume because of congestion. Multiple complaints, but still not as expected.

About a week ago, I realised our town and especially my neighbourhood / street does have a backbone from Link Africa - with a line pretty much passing our driveway.

I sent an email to Link Africa on Thursday, explaining the whole thing. They confirmed their presence here and that I can in fact get a business fibre line to my house - of course, FTTB pricing is steep compared to FTTH.

Additionally, they kindly created a feasibility survey link to pass to everyone in the neighbourhood to fill in, as the first step of the petition.


Anyone been through this process before and could provide more input around what to expect, how to better approach it, or anything that might be worth while?


@websquadza Wrote an awesome explanation about the technicalities here which made me realise it's not easy getting someone to invest fibre here, but at the same time, not impossible and perhaps worth a shot approaching the companies.
 
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Got someone in the neighbourhood to circulate the petition.... He's got an email list and whatsapp of everyone in the hood and hopefully people are completing it.

Will get in touch with Link Africa again soon and ask what's the progress on the survey.
 
Managed to get 51 and counting responses on the Link Africa survey.

Link Africa got back to me that they are passing it on to a smaller last mile ISP who operates in the area, with the comment, "Thanks for your interest - I’m fairly confident we can make this happen."

Fingers crossed.
 
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