Fibre piracy
Music and movie piracy is a well known term among the general population and something which publishing houses are doing their best to fight.
A lesser known form of piracy is starting to creep in to the fibre network construction industry, however. These pirates are taking advantage of open trenches and are putting their own fibre and sleeves in these trenches before they are closed.
This means that these ‘fibre pirates’ can theoretically build a patchy fibre network, or at least point-to-point fibre links, without incurring the very high trenching cost.
The sleeves and fibre pairs are typically a cheap component of building a fibre network when compared with the cost planning, gaining permission to dig up roads and pavements and then trenching and laying the fibre.
Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), a company which manages a nationwide carrier neutral, Open Access fibre Optic ducting infrastructure, has been the victim of fibre piracy recently.
DFA Director Richard Came said that until a few weeks ago he would have dismissed the idea of fibre piracy as fantasy, but DFA was recently the victims of a trench hijack.
"The motive in this case was not theft, but laziness. Sub-contractors building a trench for another telecoms company took advantage of our recently backfilled trench (we had used traditional manual trenching in the pavement, rather than our usual mechanised trenching in the street). They had lifted our ducting and placed their ducting beneath ours. In doing this they damaged our cable," said Came.
"Our cable monitoring system alerted us to their presence and we caught them red handed. I assume they had taken a contract at a very low price and utilising our trench gave them a cost effective short cut."
According to other fibre infrastructure developers like Vodacom Business, MTN, Neotel and Telkom they are not aware of any incidents of fibre piracy or trench hijacking.
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