FibreCo: Our pricing will turn SA broadband market upside down

Late last year a new national fibre project, FibreCo, was unveiled – set to take on Telkom, Broadband Infraco, Neotel and Dark Fibre Africa. FibreCo is a partnership between Cell C, Convergence Partners and Internet Solutions that is developing an open-access, long-haul terrestrial fibre optic network.

According to FibreCo, this is to address the need for a national transmission infrastructure to connect South Africa to the gamut of undersea cables that are set to land, and have already landed on our shores.

Speaking at a fibre seminar held at the Axiz offices in Midrand, Andile Ngcaba, chairman and founding partner of Convergence Partners, said that South Africa is still not seeing the benefit of all these undersea cables that connect us to the rest of the world.

Ngcaba also previously said that whilst the cost of international transmission has dropped significantly since 2009 with the arrival of new undersea fibre networks, national transmission in South Africa still accounts for a significant proportion of telecommunications costs to end users, and constitutes a critical bottleneck to ordinary citizens and businesses.

FibreCo plans to address this by offering disruptive pricing for carrying national traffic. When asked whether FibreCo is planning to shake up the local broadband market with aggressive bandwidth pricing, Ngcaba said “No, we’re going to turn it upside down.”

Cheaper bandwidth pricing will go a long way toward making broadband access cheaper in South Africa, and an initiative such as FibreCo can indeed have a big impact on end-user pricing, as Ngcaba suggested.

Ngcaba didn’t want to disclose specifics on the progress of the network, but FibreCo announced a few weeks ago that the project is still on track.

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