Joburg Broadband Network Project progress

As I recall a number of initiatives wired and wireless have started at Orange farm.
What so special about the place.
 
On a side note, Durban went the whole metro link thing as well and last I read they partnered with Mweb to sell it but after that I aint heard squat. So they probably going to roll this out and then the municipality uses it and nothing else happens
 
Is this yet another vaporware municipal project? We've had a decade of grandiose announcements about various rollouts of wifi connected cities across the country with never a whiff of any connectivity for anyone at the end of the day - will this really be any different?

The roads have been endlessly dug up around Joburg as every man and his dog installs their "revolutionary" fibre loops that will provide unprecedented connectivity to the businesses and resident's in Joburg, yet despite this having been done by MTN, Vodacom, Neotel, etc etc etc, it is still nigh on impossible to use this connectivity for anyone other than large organisations.

Even though there are at least three cables running directly past our business premises in Randburg, Neotel refuses to bother with us saying they do not deal with SME's and the others (Vodacom and MTN) want so much money, firstly to run a cable into our building, and secondly for the actual bandwidth, that it is totally unfeasible. It seems that all these fancy fibre projects are only for the benefit of the big networks backhaul operations and interconnecting large corporate data centres.

This is only going to result in all the same major roads in Joburg being dug up for the umpteenth time so another crowd can add their cables to the mix, with no real benefit to the average consumer.
 
The problem is that they want to recoup their capital investment in 2 years or less on the fibre rollout, despite it having a lifespan measuring in decades, so pricing is ridiculous. For example - DFA.

One also has to wonder how and why Ericsson won this tender.
 
garp said:
Is this yet another vaporware municipal project? We've had a decade of grandiose announcements about various rollouts of wifi connected cities across the country with never a whiff of any connectivity for anyone at the end of the day - will this really be any different?

The roads have been endlessly dug up around Joburg as every man and his dog installs their "revolutionary" fibre loops that will provide unprecedented connectivity to the businesses and resident's in Joburg, yet despite this having been done by MTN, Vodacom, Neotel, etc etc etc, it is still nigh on impossible to use this connectivity for anyone other than large organisations.

Even though there are at least three cables running directly past our business premises in Randburg, Neotel refuses to bother with us saying they do not deal with SME's and the others (Vodacom and MTN) want so much money, firstly to run a cable into our building, and secondly for the actual bandwidth, that it is totally unfeasible. It seems that all these fancy fibre projects are only for the benefit of the big networks backhaul operations and interconnecting large corporate data centres.

This is only going to result in all the same major roads in Joburg being dug up for the umpteenth time so another crowd can add their cables to the mix, with no real benefit to the average consumer.
Click to expand...


++++1 Well written, you only state facts. Fibre everwhere, except to residents, even if we are willing to pay for it. No, VodaCom, I cannot pay R 50k to connect 20m of fibre from the street to my SME - I think it is a bit un-reasonable wouldn't you say. :erm:

Hopefully some ISP would see the opportunity in the market and come up with a FTTH offering soon. Even if it means paying R 5000 to get the cable laid and about R 2000 per month for the service - I am sure there would be a SME or high-profile private user market out there that would consider something like this.
 
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its quite sad because you would expect the fibre roll out to be targeting the masses. Nonetheless, i think the govername's trying to also break into the BB market. You'll know that our govername are pimps.So this might be a bold move on their business side
 
The last quote we got from MTN for fibre to our offices was a minimum R30k to run the cable from the street and R18k+ p.m. for a measly 2mbps internet connection. To make matters worse, they said that if any of the other 7 companies in our building wanted access, they wouldn't have to pay since we would have already paid for the cable into the building. This made no sense - basically the first to put in the cable would pay for the whole cost and any subsequent users would be added to the same cable at no cost!!! Same story from Vodacom. Our view was that if any of these service providers want our business, they should foot the bill to connect the building.

We now have a very reliable WDSL radio link from iBurst that took two days to install from order and runs at 15mbps for R6500 pm, approx R2k installation - now if only iBurst would sort out their billing mess...
 
Well apart from all of this, what about the other cities? Cape Town, Durban, PE? I am seriously ignorant, so forgive me if there already is stuff happening there. But I certainly haven't heard about it...
 
Couldn't consumers band together to do their own FTTH type thing, similar to the WUG?
Or even act on behalf of / for an ISP?
I'm guessing some sort of license and big capital would be needed.
 
The Monkeys in Orange Farm will steal the Fibre thinking its copper, then what?
 
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