Map of US fibre backbone

[furpile]

Hi. I found this article in Popular Science interesting. Especially the following part:

They were also able to determine that 89.67 percent of conduits were shared between at least two Internet service providers, and more than 50 percent were shared by at least four ISPs, finding that it was actually uncommon for a conduit to not be shared among more ISPs.

I don't know how much the ISP's in SA share but I doubt it is this much. Having this level of co-operation must help in speeding up broadband rollout and avoiding infrastructure duplication?

 

[fragtion]

With the exception of DFA (a real beacon of hope for the consumer), each network (vodacom, neotel, mtn, and telkom) seems to have built their own independent infrastructures with more exclusive/greedier approaches in mind, so it will probably take a number of years before that level of sharing/openness becomes more prevalent. The smaller ISP's don't have the capital leverage to compete at this stage, so we can only depend on these bigger players to roll out and offer the services at this point