DFA explains service disruptions
The main contributor to service interruptions experienced by DFA customers in Johannesburg is network modernisation and upgrades conducted to improve the network’s capacity.
This is feedback from DFA chief operations officer Wesley Nash, who responded to complaints from subscribers about prolonged downtime and instability.
Nash told MyBroadband there was no DFA network collapse.
“There have been some service interruptions, but these are temporary and largely isolated to particular areas of the network in Johannesburg,” he said.
DFA’s upgrades included replacing older network components and preparing the Johannesburg network for improved delivery times on new links.
“The ‘futureproofing’ plan includes improving the architecture of the network to cater for future services and technologies,” Nash said.
“It gives DFA the ability to deliver more services and better serve our customers with quicker delivery and faster incident resolution times.”
He said the network upgrades were partially necessitated by DFA’s changes to its FTTB product portfolio and improved pricing.
The new products were designed to provide customers with improved service levels (SLAs) and more cost-effective products.
“It is expected that this will translate in a significant increase in sales, and hence the requirement to upgrade the network,” Nash said.
To minimise the impact on customers, DFA paused new link installations in the affected areas in Johannesburg.
“The unaffected areas in Johannesburg and the rest of the country were not impacted by the modernisation and upgrade activities, and the delivery of links was not affected,” he said.
DFA service disruptions and customer engagements
Nash said that between October 2022 and December 2022, less than 2% of the total services were outside of SLA. “DFA will improve this over the next few weeks,” he said.
He said DFA communicated with customers confirming their awareness of outages experienced, and gave them a detailed outline of actions being put in place to address these issues.
“DFA has focused its upgrade activities on the network’s primary congested manholes and has taken deliberate and appropriate action to minimise the impact on customers,” Nash said.
Of the affected areas, ten were identified as top priorities. Of these ten, there are only four still pending network upgrades.
Nash said DFA had put immense effort and resources into their network improvement plan, which includes:
- The floating and installation of new cables
- The addition and expansion of handholes where needed
- The replacement of ageing handholes and fibre joints
- Rerouting of services ensuring network stability
- Investment in bolstering resources, increasing and improving service capacity and quicker turnaround times
“Remedial and upgrade work is a continuous activity in maintaining any telecommunications infrastructure,” he said.
“In saying this, we have identified potential future risks to network stability and implemented measures to mitigate this.”
In parallel to the plan addressing the more immediate challenges, DFA is continuing to improve and modernise the network, focusing on Johannesburg.
“We would like to reiterate that this is temporary, and DFA is giving this its highest priority, working around the clock to resolve network infrastructure faults as soon as possible whilst completing the upgrade work,” Nash said.
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