Think Gbps, says DFA
Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), a Johannesburg-based company specialising in building and installation carrier neutral, open access fibre infrastructure, is making good progress in covering large parts of South Africa’s major cities. DFA already has 700km of fibre infrastructure in Gauteng, Cape Town and Durban, and the company is planning more than 750km of rollouts in 2009.
One of the current projects involve infrastructure linking the Seacom landing station in Mtunzini with Durban, something which can bring more competition in the international bandwidth market. DFA director Richard Came expects a high demand for Seacom access from various players, prompting the investment in the Durban-Mtunzini fibre investment.
More competition
Came is confident that DFA, which functions on open access principles, will bring much needed competition to the fibre backhaul market and drive down the cost of bandwidth in South Africa. According to Came three or four players are simply not enough to create a truly competitive telecoms market, and that one should have a few more to ensure that bandwidth prices start tumbling.
Internet Solutions recently announced that they will be using DFA for the fibre networking requirements, joining the likes of Vodacom, MTN and Neotel which already have a relationship with the company. With the recent awarding of over 500 ECNS licenses by ICASA the potential market for DFA customers are however much wider than just the major telecoms providers and first tier ISPs.
The problems associated with a single fixed line infrastructure provider can also be seen in the massive backlog in leased lines from Telkom – currently around the 20 000 mark according to Came. This backlog is holding providers like MTN and Vodacom back in launching new, faster services and DFA can in some cases provide an alternative fibre solution to Telkom’s current copper infrastructure.
Higher bandwidth requirements
According to Came the company already has clients ranging from the largest telecoms players to small ISPs, and expect the demand to pick up as South African businesses start to wake up to the concept of high bandwidth.
Came said that many corporate businesses are currently still content with a few Mbps speeds, but that a change will take place where they start to think in terms of Gbps rather than Mbps. This is something which Ian Isenberg, General Manager for Telco Services at Internet Solutions (IS), said is already starting to happen.
Isenberg said that IS has seen a dramatic increase in demand for 100 Mbps, 1Gbps and even multiple-Gbps connections, something which require fibre networks to deliver. This increasing demand for high capacity connections is partly why IS is investing in their own fibre network.
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