Big players on Cape Town fibre network

The City of Cape Town recently announced that it has entered into third-party agreements with 8 different service providers for access to its upgraded fibre network infrastructure.

Asked about the agreements, director for information systems and technology at City of Cape Town, Andre Stelzner, said that the City has a number of different types of third-party agreements.

These range from infrastructure leasing, to providing physical cross-connections to operators’ network centres.

According to Stelzner, the eight companies that have signed such agreements with the City of Cape Town are: RSAWEB, Cybersmart, Vanilla, Enhanced Networks, Comtel, Neotel, Vodacom, and TENET.

“In addition, we have created peer connections to 3rd party network centres,” he said. “This lays the foundation for individual 3rd party commercial service providers to enter into infrastructure lease agreements against the City’s published tariffs to render services across City infrastructure to their clients.”

Also contained in the press release announcing the upgrades to its fibre network, is a statement from the City that negotiations are progressing with 20 more companies regarding lease agreement.

Among the 20 companies are “some of the country’s larger telecoms companies,” the City of Cape Town said.

Asked for more details on these 20 additional agreements being negotiated, the manager of telecommunications for City of Cape Town, Leon van Wyk, said that it is not the appropriate to name the companies at this stage.

“We are very confident that there are more licensed service providers interested in making use of City Telecoms infrastructure,” Van Wyk said. “However, it seems inappropriate at this stage to mention the names of these service providers until they have accepted our contract.”

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