Jeff Daniels looks at yet another example of how South Africa is setting the pace of change.
Recent political developments around the Middle East have highlighted the difficulty many governments are having struggling with the transition from some sort of oligarchy and tribal rule to a form of democratic one, able to offer opportunities to every citizen. Contrast this with South Africa: the government has many critics and probably rightly so but by golly, they have moved fast in what is—in political terms—an amazingly short period of time.
The UK, for example, is one of the most open economies in the world; yet it had to wait for Mrs Thatcher before state-owned enterprises were deregulated and thrown open to competition. The South African government—in power for less than 20 years, and which could be forgiven for feeling its way slowly—has moved along at a much more cracking pace.
In the field of communications, South Africa had, until 2006, only one licensed provider of fixed-line services. Since then, with the freeing-up of the industry, it’s been a period of dramatic change. The combination of deregulation and the three-way convergence of technology (voice, video and data) has revolutionised the market and thrown out the old order. The future will bear no resemblance to the status quo that has existed for the past century.
The fact is that in the rush for market dominance it will take some years for the dust to settle and to see just how wise some of the investments turn out to be. Newly licensed operators have been commissioning their own network infrastructures but as these operators are all interested in the same high user density areas, there has inevitably been a high level of overlap. An unfortunate factor is that civil engineering infrastructure and ducting account for 70 to 80 per cent of the total construction cost of a fibre optic transmission network but deliver no strategic advantage to the operator.
Sharing this cost with others is therefore a natural course of action. Over and above the economies involved, issues such as minimising disruption to other utilities justifies a coordinated effort to such extensive and potentially disruptive construction projects.
Step into the limelight Dark Fibre Africa (DFA)—a most wonderfully evocatively named company that is offering just such an alternative. DFA was established by Community Investment Ventures (a black economic empowerment investment vehicle), the venture finance provider Venfin and investment banker Absa Capital, to build a carrier-neutral, dark fibre infrastructure for the transmission of metro and long haul telecommunications traffic.
In the trade, dark fibre is the name for an optical fibre infrastructure which has been installed but is not being used. As fibre optic cable is a conduit through which data travels in the form of light, an unused network is said to be ‘unlit’, or in other words, ‘dark’. As capacity within the network is leased by individual service providers, the dark fibre is progressively lit by new high-speed services customers are signing up to.
The advantage of dark fibre is that it affords telecommunications operators the choice of selecting their preferred technology, whether that be SDH, ATM, ethernet or fibre channel, without having to incur the massive up-front capital expenditure of constructing the entire network infrastructure or having to rent an expensive managed service from an operator that may also be a competitor. Simply put, the main benefits of dark fibre lie in its relatively lower cost, capacity and speed of execution.
The very nature of the business means that from time to time, carriers will share or swap infrastructure with competitor networks. Users of DFA can rest assured that it is commercially neutral and does not compete with the users of its service.
In 2009 DFA launched its data and broadband services, including voice in collaboration with Cisco Systems. The launch marked a milestone for DFA, which is creating an open access dark fibre network in metropolitan areas, with over 800 kilometres of fibre optic cable laid in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town at a cost of R1.5 billion.
Having first installed its networks in the most important business centres, the latest stage of its development is to go long-distance with the installation of a fibre optic cable from Pretoria in Gauteng to Empangeni on the outskirts of Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. The route is a massive undertaking of 500 kilometres as the crow flies. On its journey the cable will cross numerous mountains and natural drainage ways.
The ducting work itself is being carried out by sister company Muvoni Weltex. Using a fleet of 15 trenching machines they work on a seven-day dig-and-repair cycle laying fibre ducting at a rate of up to 700 metres per day—significantly faster than the 50 metres per day achieved by manual trench digging. To minimise disruption, as it travels along highways, ducting is being installed in the central reservation.
Physical and digital security is paramount. DFA uses state-of-the-art ducting that enables large users of communications capacity to enjoy logical separation and ownership of communications capability, while sharing the same physical right-of-way access routes with their customers.
Each trench generally has four ducts and 28 micro-ducts, providing capacity far in excess of current demand requirements. A fibre-containing cable, which holds a series of colour-coded insulation wires through which the individual fibres run, is passed through these micro-ducts. The fibre cables are then blown through the micro-ducts on a cushion of air at a rate of up to three kilometres at a time. For security purposes, manholes are locked using an electronic key and can only be opened by the issue of a code to the key holder from the Johannesburg operations centre.
DFA is responsible for financing and constructing ducting infrastructure and is making this investment on a ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy. So while Africa has been known as the Dark Continent for centuries, the southern part of it, at any rate, is rapidly becoming the lit continent. www.dfafrica.co.za
