Who’s to blame for the roads mess?
Motorists in major metropolitan areas are frustrated by the multiple trenches being dug by telecommunication operators along and across our roads, and understandably so.
Major arteries in Sandton, Rosebank, Randburg, the Joburg and Pretoria CBDs, as well as Cape Town and Durban are being chopped up, trenched and sometimes badly patched, all in the name of broadband internet. We’re all familiar with traffic delays, badly patched roads, diversions, uneven manhole covers (if you’re lucky), washed away trenches and narrower major routes.
Besides the ongoing upgrades to cabling by Telkom, Neotel has been very active in building a fibre network, both on a metro level, as well as a suburban (access) level. In recent months, Dark Fibre Africa has also begun rolling out a point-to-point and metro level network, believed to be chiefly for Vodacom.
Dark Fibre’s stated intention is to “build a carrier neutral, dark fibre infrastructure for the transmission of metro and long haul telecommunications traffic”. MTN (JSE:MTN), too, sliced up roads between Rosebank and Sandton last year and has been encircling the Sandton CBD with fibre.
No sign, not Neotel
But, Neotel says it’s bearing the brunt of most of the frustration from motorists, even though it hardly crosses roads. Neotel’s metro rings were installed last year. During this process, the company used an orange truck to trench and install fibre along sidewalks as a pilot.
Head of Neotel’s enterprise unit Stefano Mattiello says this pilot is over and other operators are now using the trucks. Neotel’s focus now is blanketing central business districts with fibre along pavements.
Telkom uses green ducting for cabling, Neotel uses orange ducting, but to (perhaps cause confusion) other operators have also started using orange ducting. This creates the perception that Neotel’s carving up most of Gauteng, even though this isn’t the case.
“All our work is manual”, Mattiello explains. He says that “there are a lot of companies out there going incognito, that’s not us.
“We always sign ourselves, we always advertise ourselves.”
If there’s no sign, it’s not Neotel, he adds. He says that the work Neotel’s busy with at present means “guys with pickaxes”. The company currently has more than 1 500 subcontracted employees trenching, and these contractors are from local communities.
OSP Manager Mehmood Suban explains that Neotel’s service level agreement with Joburg Council is that the company’s sub-contractors “trench and reinstate a patch of 300m … maximum… then move on”. He says that sometimes this limit comes right down “to about 50m”, and the piece-by-piece work is actually slowing the company’s rollout down somewhat.
Suban says Neotel seldom crosses roads and when it does, the company is not actually allowed to re-tar the actual road surface. This work is subcontracted back to the city council. Suban says council has a “two-week timeline to permanently reinstate” the road surface, but that this is not always the case.
When Neotel crosses roads, it does what Suban terms a “temporary reinstatement” which will hold for the two weeks. Typically this would be filling a trench with a cement and sand mixture.
Neotel has a 30 day deadline to “reinstate” all trenches, and this doesn’t simply mean filling a hole. This means to return the sidewalk to its original state. Mattiello jokes that for the overland trench to the SAT-3 landing station at Melkbosstrand, the company actually had to dig up, keep and replant shrubs on the route.
Why fibre and why all the trenches?
South Africans love complaining about internet speeds and Telkom; often the two gripes go hand-in-hand. The only way we’re going to experience true broadband (no matter what operators claim DSL is), is via fibre. This is especially important for corporates, who need high-speed internet access.
Fibre makes this a reality. Neotel is capitalising on this by focussing its enterprise efforts on fibre to the kerb. In time, as MD Ajay Pandey has pointed out, this service will be expanded to the home, offering consumers real high-speed internet.
Fibre is also being installed for mobile operators to carry back-haul traffic. Usually companies like Vodacom and MTN rely on Telkom links to carry traffic between base stations and switches, and these links are expensive. Telkom, for example, this week reported revenue of R1,85bn on mobile leased facilities for the 2008 financial year. This is serious money and obviously operators want to, as far as possible, self-provide.
MTN is believed to have linked its mobile switching centres in Rosebank and Sandton with the fibre link it installed last year. Vodacom, through Dark Fibre Africa, seems to be doing a similar thing, except on a bigger scale across Gauteng.
Light at the end of the tunnel
Aside from the bad pun, there is positive news ahead. Once the metro rings are laid, and the end of this process is in sight, the focus will be on getting fibre to the kerb.
It seems that a fair amount of Dark Fibre’s work is done. Dark Fibre’s Richard Came could not be reached for comment.
Neotel’s Mattiello says that as for Neotel, motorists are welcome to phone its call centre (0800 000 636) to find out whether it is busy with trenching in a certain area.
Moneyweb
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