Fibre10.10.2024

Truth about DFA network problems

Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) has spent over R450 million rearchitecting its network to address service delivery and performance problems.

This was revealed by Remgro’s head of strategic investments, Pieter Uys, during the company’s recent annual financial results presentation.

Remgro owns an effective 57% stake in DFA’s parent company, Community Investment Ventures Holdings (CIVH). CIVH also owns Vumatel.

“Last time I reported, we had to do a lot of work to get the DFA network world-class again,” Uys stated.

MyBroadband first reported about the problems DFA experienced on its network in early January 2023 after receiving numerous complaints from its customers about network instability and downtime.

A large DFA customer told MyBroadband at the time that DFA’s fibre network used to be stable but deteriorated rapidly towards the end of 2022.

They said the network problems were so significant that DFA could not meet its service level agreements for numerous clients.

This forced DFA to halt installations until further notice.

Another customer said his ISP informed him about big problems on the DFA network, adding that a DFA technician would visit them to investigate. The technician never arrived.

The network issues became so severe that the DFA network operations centre started to respond to faults with a generic message.

In a November 2022 message to customers, DFA said it had seen a “variety of challenges which are adversely impacting our network performance in the Gauteng South Region.”

However, while its focus seemed to be on the Gauteng South region at the time, DFA customers in other areas also reported problems.

DFA also said at the time that it had implemented an emergency network rehabilitation programme to limit the increase in service interruptions.

After MyBroadband’s initial report, DFA disputed that it was experiencing widespread service problems and said it was conducting upgrades to modernise and “future-proof” its network.

It said these upgrades included replacing older network components and preparing the Johannesburg network for improved delivery times on new links.

However, Uys’ report paints a different picture of what happened during that time.

“We stopped all new connections to the network,” he confirmed.

“Because the network was initially designed to service mostly telco customers and not thousands of connections a month, we could not effectively connect those customers without disrupting the network.”

Uys explained that the problems arose after DFA expanded its product portfolio to do business fibre in addition to providing dark fibre for telecommunications network operators.

“The network didn’t keep up, and we had to freeze the rollout and rearchitect the network.”

He also confirmed that bringing down delivery times on new links was a factor.

“Before we rearchitected the network, it sometimes took three months to connect a corporate customer from the date of order,” said Uys.

“With the new architecture, that has come down to 3 weeks.”

For the year ended 31 March 2024, Remgro reported that DFA’s revenue grew 2.3% from R2.65 billion to R2.72 billion.

“Growth is slower than expected and less than we budgeted for,” Uys said, explaining that this was largely because DFA froze its network rollout.

DFA’s costs also ballooned during the year, causing operating earnings to drop 19% from R1.33 billion to R1.08 billion.

“With the architecture, most of that work can only be done at night,” Uys explained.

“It is very dangerous to work in some of these areas where the work was done, so we had to step up the security.”

Uys said load-shedding also had some impact on the DFA’s operating costs.

According to Uys, most of the work to rearchitect the DFA network is completed.

He said they have invested R450 million out of the R750 million that they budgeted to get the network world-class again.

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