To all FTTH serving on Metrofibre - send me a proposal

[MagicDude4Eva]

It is really unreal to watch the process of getting fibre into a residential area, especially considering that most of us live in complexes/estates with at least a 100 units.

In my journey of getting fibre into our estate in Broadacres we finally found that Metrofibre will be interested in putting in infrastructure and they also support a number of ISPs on their AON (Vodacom, CellC, Afrihost, MWeb, Cool Ideas, Cipherwave, Internet Solutions, Firestream) but surprisingly when asking for plans/pricing for those ISPs we get this:

NO, we build the fibre infrastructure, the residents opting to use an open access partner would approach their ISP, who would approach us to activate their customers.
We bill the ISP, and how the ISP recoups this from their customer is between them and their customer. We’re not involved there.

Quite a lacklustre attitude (if I were to run such business, I would have price-bands pre-negotiated with every ISP on my network, so that I can offer customers those price-sheets instead of every customer having to individually negotiate).

So this post goes out to all the FTTH providers running on Metrofibre - please send me proposals (our estate has 200 units with 120 units confirmed that their monthly spent will be from R800 upwards - some are happy with 10Mbps / others obviously want 50/100Mbps) for capped, uncapped and month-to-month / 12-month options. Send mail to [email protected].

I will again separately approach those ISPs, but my previous emails remain unanswered - quite puzzling since a project of this size would guarantee a min 100-150K/pm revenue...

 

[Tim_vb]

There is often an exclusivity agreement for a limited time (e.g. Greencom in Sunninghill). A wholesaler should not be interfering in the retail space with recommendations anyway.

Just look at the providers websites, Firestream seem pretty competitive

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

A wholesaler should not be interfering in the retail space with recommendations anyway.

I disagree: Companies like MetroFibre appoint a number of ISPs which they allow onto their network (from the list above you will notice the absence of Vox and others). The ISP and Metrofibre would have a basic agreement with regards to what Metrofibre will get from the ISP, so it is only logical that the network provider is more organised and has at least standard pricing for each ISP on their network available.

If FTTH was a true open-access-model (such as ADSL/VDSL), I would agree with you as I can change my ISP (provided I leave the line with Telkom) as many times as I like. On FTTH this is only available in a limited fashion - i.e. if you happen to pick a poor-performing ISP with some exclusivity you are pretty much stuck as SLA's are so broad that it does not allow you to cancel (and since ISPs are "pre-selected" by wholesalers you are limited by choice).

 

[NetMpofu]

Interesting

 

[adamr]

yeah was going to create this thread ... so i also see FNI subcontracted by metro fibre laying fibre right outisde the complex im in. This is in Fourways ... happy days

Guy said should all be done in next couple of days and its ready to service. I see also greencom is the fourways provider. Maybe ill give them a shout to figure out pricing

 

[koeksGHT]

If we can get on their network i'll give pricing too, waiting at this stage for them.

 

[qdada]

I disagree: Companies like MetroFibre appoint a number of ISPs which they allow onto their network (from the list above you will notice the absence of Vox and others). The ISP and Metrofibre would have a basic agreement with regards to what Metrofibre will get from the ISP, so it is only logical that the network provider is more organised and has at least standard pricing for each ISP on their network available.

If FTTH was a true open-access-model (such as ADSL/VDSL), I would agree with you as I can change my ISP (provided I leave the line with Telkom) as many times as I like. On FTTH this is only available in a limited fashion - i.e. if you happen to pick a poor-performing ISP with some exclusivity you are pretty much stuck as SLA's are so broad that it does not allow you to cancel (and since ISPs are "pre-selected" by wholesalers you are limited by choice).

+1

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

If we can get on their network i'll give pricing too, waiting at this stage for them.

Sounds great. Perhaps for us FTTH-newbs: Why do network providers handpick ISPs? Surely it would be in their interest to have everyone play on their network - it gives customers choice, the FTTH-ISPs would have more penetration and could even offload some of the marketing. The conspiracy-theorist in me tends to think there are some backhand deals done to exclude certain providers (i.e. I think Vox and others are not on the list as they are fierce competitors to Afrihost/MWeb in the ADSL space and would do the same in the FTTH space - or)?

 

[koeksGHT]

Sounds great. Perhaps for us FTTH-newbs: Why do network providers handpick ISPs? Surely it would be in their interest to have everyone play on their network - it gives customers choice, the FTTH-ISPs would have more penetration and could even offload some of the marketing. The conspiracy-theorist in me tends to think there are some backhand deals done to exclude certain providers (i.e. I think Vox and others are not on the list as they are fierce competitors to Afrihost/MWeb in the ADSL space and would do the same in the FTTH space - or)?

Definitely seems swayed to bigger players(Telkom-Vuma deal) after we already contacted Vuma before(I think was 3 months prior). Vumatel seem'd to give a reasonable explanation that they needed to install more homes before they board new ISP's otherwise it's too saturated (Different ISP per house ). Had lunch with Douglas Reed last week and apparently Vox are not doing so well Something like they only made R15m profit last year. I know Afrihost also lost a good chunk of their clients before they launched Afrigreen as they had issues.

I would think it's like

[video=youtube;0ilMx7k7mso]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso[/video]

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

Definitely seems swayed to bigger players(Telkom-Vuma deal) after we already contacted Vuma before(I think was 3 months prior). Vumatel seem'd to give a reasonable explanation that they needed to install more homes before they board new ISP's otherwise it's too saturated (Different ISP per house ). Had lunch with Douglas Reed last week and apparently Vox are not doing so well Something like they only made R15m profit last year. I know Afrihost also lost a good chunk of their clients before they launched Afrigreen as they had issues.

Since I grew up on a farm: The big problem with ISPs and telco-SPs is that you own the cow (= network) and the only thing you want is sell everyone is 1L of milk (= bandwidth) per month and then charge exorbitant amounts of money if I want more milk. Eventually you realise that the cow you have is giving milk too slowly, so you get a faster cow (3G to LTE), but you continue giving us that 1L of milk at the same price. Eventually you become innovative and you offer me more milk which I can only drink while I am asleep (midnight specials). You also restrict me how much of my milk I can drink during the day - and that is when I realise that my 1L of milk is shared with other users and the milk you offer is actually diluted with water

Where you then completely fail is that you overlook the opportunity to sell me cheese/yoghurt or even cross-sell meat/fruit and veg.

No idea why no ISP cross-sells VOD, gaming services or other over-the-top offers. At least Vodacom goes as "progressive" to also now sell funeral cover (kid you not, literally got a call from them 2 hours ago and I am not even a Vodacom customer).

TBH - if I was a Naspers/DSTV/MWeb I would have offered 1Mbps fibre-services for free to all my DSTV subscribers and started to service them via FTTH instead of satellite. Foot in the door and it is an obvious choice that users would upgrade to value-added services.

 

[koeksGHT]

TBH - if I was a Naspers/DSTV/MWeb I would have offered 1Mbps fibre-services for free to all my DSTV subscribers and started to service them via FTTH instead of satellite. Foot in the door and it is an obvious choice that users would upgrade to value-added services.

You joke like they didn't do zero rated bandwidth for streaming before(Was Voda I think).

Definitely lots to offer in the cloud of things

 

[Chevron]

Since I grew up on a farm: The big problem with ISPs and telco-SPs is that you own the cow (= network) and the only thing you want is sell everyone is 1L of milk (= bandwidth) per month and then charge exorbitant amounts of money if I want more milk. Eventually you realise that the cow you have is giving milk too slowly, so you get a faster cow (3G to LTE), but you continue giving us that 1L of milk at the same price. Eventually you become innovative and you offer me more milk which I can only drink while I am asleep (midnight specials). You also restrict me how much of my milk I can drink during the day - and that is when I realise that my 1L of milk is shared with other users and the milk you offer is actually diluted with water

Where you then completely fail is that you overlook the opportunity to sell me cheese/yoghurt or even cross-sell meat/fruit and veg.

No idea why no ISP cross-sells VOD, gaming services or other over-the-top offers. At least Vodacom goes as "progressive" to also now sell funeral cover (kid you not, literally got a call from them 2 hours ago and I am not even a Vodacom customer).

TBH - if I was a Naspers/DSTV/MWeb I would have offered 1Mbps fibre-services for free to all my DSTV subscribers and started to service them via FTTH instead of satellite. Foot in the door and it is an obvious choice that users would upgrade to value-added services.

While that analogy is a bit of a stretch, I would agree that triple play services are long overdue in South Africa.

 

[Ben$ch]

Good day

I came across this thread on the forum and was wondering if perhaps I could offer some assistance?
I work for Metrofibre in the network operations centre. I can definitely get you in touch with all the right people on our side
and answer any questions you might have...Are you still looking for a provider for the estate in Broadacres?

Jonathan

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

Good day

I came across this thread on the forum and was wondering if perhaps I could offer some assistance?
I work for Metrofibre in the network operations centre. I can definitely get you in touch with all the right people on our side
and answer any questions you might have...Are you still looking for a provider for the estate in Broadacres?

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,

thanks for the follow-up. We actually met with Corlia and the project manager (forgot his name now) on the 24th and signed off the MOU and plans. We have received some 3rd party proposals (the majority of ISPs on your list could however not be bothered to actually respond) but if you have more contact details pls e-mail me.

The next steps in the project is really for MFN to kick off the project (there will be some resident info days) and I would think that the majority of "regular" users (residents who are not power-users) will probably just go with your standard plans. People like myself will go with another provider due to the uncapped/high-volume/VPN-/realtime requirements.

 

[Ben$ch]

Okay, well that's good news, at least the ball is rolling. I was just going to put you in touch with Corlia or Johan from our side... Thanks for your enquiry and business! There aren't a huge amount of ISP's to choose from... Currently we have Greencom,Kiklo,Firestream,Cipherwave,Rocketnet & DNA with a new ISP starting now - AccelerateIT. All the approved ISP's of ours offer slightly different prices to MFN - but the important thing to know is that they all connect over our Fibre. So basically at the end of the day,whether you're with Greencom or Kiklo for example, you will get the exact same fibre service. So i.e a 50mbps greencom service will function identically to another 50mbps service with Kiklo. The main difference is just the price and how you are treated really I guess
Metrofibre also offer capped packages in conjunction to uncapped (which the other ISP's do not.)

The only current exceptions to the above, as far as the internet goes, are Firestream and Cipherwave - They are layer 2 partners which means that for their links you actually use their internet & backbone not ours - so they give you 'internet' - not us - even though its still our fibre, the routing is completely different. So a 50mbps service with the layer 2 partners is slightly different in that way.

All packages are the same... the slowest is 10mbps and the fastest is 200mbps. I don't think Firestream or Cipherwave offer a 200 though... You just need to weigh up your options and decide whats ideal for you.

If you need anything else let me know... good luck and I hope you get your service soon!

 

[MagicDude4Eva]

Okay, well that's good news, at least the ball is rolling. I was just going to put you in touch with Corlia or Johan from our side... Thanks for your enquiry and business! There aren't a huge amount of ISP's to choose from... Currently we have Greencom,Kiklo,Firestream,Cipherwave,Rocketnet & DNA with a new ISP starting now - AccelerateIT. All the approved ISP's of ours offer slightly different prices to MFN - but the important thing to know is that they all connect over our Fibre. So basically at the end of the day,whether you're with Greencom or Kiklo for example, you will get the exact same fibre service. So i.e a 50mbps greencom service will function identically to another 50mbps service with Kiklo. The main difference is just the price and how you are treated really I guess
Metrofibre also offer capped packages in conjunction to uncapped (which the other ISP's do not.)

The only current exceptions to the above, as far as the internet goes, are Firestream and Cipherwave - They are layer 2 partners which means that for their links you actually use their internet & backbone not ours - so they give you 'internet' - not us - even though its still our fibre, the routing is completely different. So a 50mbps service with the layer 2 partners is slightly different in that way.

All packages are the same... the slowest is 10mbps and the fastest is 200mbps. I don't think Firestream or Cipherwave offer a 200 though... You just need to weigh up your options and decide whats ideal for you.

If you need anything else let me know... good luck and I hope you get your service soon!

Could you perhaps email me the pricing for the providers? I asked Corlia, but never received those. I personally will compare Firestream vs your layer 2 and see if there is a difference. Latency is for me the most important part (in addition to uncapped).

 

[PBCool]

It is really unreal to watch the process of getting fibre into a residential area, especially considering that most of us live in complexes/estates with at least a 100 units.

In my journey of getting fibre into our estate in Broadacres we finally found that Metrofibre will be interested in putting in infrastructure and they also support a number of ISPs on their AON (Vodacom, CellC, Afrihost, MWeb, Cool Ideas, Cipherwave, Internet Solutions, Firestream) but surprisingly when asking for plans/pricing for those ISPs we get this:



Quite a lacklustre attitude (if I were to run such business, I would have price-bands pre-negotiated with every ISP on my network, so that I can offer customers those price-sheets instead of every customer having to individually negotiate).

So this post goes out to all the FTTH providers running on Metrofibre - please send me proposals (our estate has 200 units with 120 units confirmed that their monthly spent will be from R800 upwards - some are happy with 10Mbps / others obviously want 50/100Mbps) for capped, uncapped and month-to-month / 12-month options. Send mail to [email protected].

I will again separately approach those ISPs, but my previous emails remain unanswered - quite puzzling since a project of this size would guarantee a min 100-150K/pm revenue...

Hi MagicDude4Eva,
I will drop you a mail directly on this but unfortunately MFN handle deployments on a case by case basis it seems, as an ISP on their network it is not our favorite to be quite honest simply because they compete with their own customers. That being said they do have certain challenges deploying to areas like Broadacres specifically because their amount of connections per area is very low due to the large properties in the area, this then applies to the whole suburb not just said properties. This is generally why they have this approach and why you wouldn't get a clear answer from them at this early stage of deployment.

I will follow up with them on your complex and see what we can do for you.

 

[PBCool]

Okay, well that's good news, at least the ball is rolling. I was just going to put you in touch with Corlia or Johan from our side... Thanks for your enquiry and business! There aren't a huge amount of ISP's to choose from... Currently we have Greencom,Kiklo,Firestream,Cipherwave,Rocketnet & DNA with a new ISP starting now - AccelerateIT. All the approved ISP's of ours offer slightly different prices to MFN - but the important thing to know is that they all connect over our Fibre. So basically at the end of the day,whether you're with Greencom or Kiklo for example, you will get the exact same fibre service. So i.e a 50mbps greencom service will function identically to another 50mbps service with Kiklo. The main difference is just the price and how you are treated really I guess
Metrofibre also offer capped packages in conjunction to uncapped (which the other ISP's do not.)

The only current exceptions to the above, as far as the internet goes, are Firestream and Cipherwave - They are layer 2 partners which means that for their links you actually use their internet & backbone not ours - so they give you 'internet' - not us - even though its still our fibre, the routing is completely different. So a 50mbps service with the layer 2 partners is slightly different in that way.

All packages are the same... the slowest is 10mbps and the fastest is 200mbps. I don't think Firestream or Cipherwave offer a 200 though... You just need to weigh up your options and decide whats ideal for you.

If you need anything else let me know... good luck and I hope you get your service soon!

Hi Ben$ch, a bit of a concern that you aren't even aware that we are operating on your network as well Also it's not AccelerateIT but AccelerIT.