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Vodacom initiates FTTB services

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 17 Sept 2014
Vodacom Business' fibre offering paves the way for true cloud and next-generation services, it says.
Vodacom Business' fibre offering paves the way for true cloud and next-generation services, it says.

Vodacom Business has started rolling out fibre-to-the-business (FTTB), with the initial phase seeing broadband connectivity of up to 100Mbps coming to selected business parks in Gauteng, Cape Town and Durban.

This forms part of the group's strategy, detailed by CEO Shameel Joosub, to launch a fibre attack that will see the high-speed pipes connect homes and businesses, with an emphasis on the latter.

Vodacom's aim to provide fibre connectivity en masse to businesses and homes hinges on it being successful in its bid to buy what was originally meant to be SA's second national operator, Neotel. That R7 billion deal has still to go through regulatory approvals before Vodacom can take advantage of its 22 000km fibre network.

Vodacom's business fibre offering - Broadband Connect Fibre - uses the latest Passive Optical Network technology, which Vodacom says will give customers access to rich content experiences via the Internet that were previously only available to large corporate customers. These services include video collaboration, voice over Internet Protocol, Hosted PBX, Office365, Cloud Backup and other data applications.

This comes in the wake of World Wide Worx and Fuseware's latest social media research, which revealed Google-owned video platform YouTube this year overtook Twitter to become SA's second most popular social media platform, sparking the start of a shift towards video consumption.

Expandable

Since 2008, Vodacom has spent more than R2 billion investing in fibre transmission which connects its more than 10 000 cellular base stations and now forms the backbone of this new FTTB service.

Vodacom CTO Vuyani Jarana says the new offering "paves the way for true cloud and other next-generation services while opening the door to a new level of efficiency, mobility and cost savings".

Vodacom Business' Broadband Connect Fibre service provides SMEs with bundled uncapped Internet access, a router and optional fixed-line voice over IP, which delivers as much as 30% savings on phone calls. Rapid deployment, including the connecting and upgrading of fibre cables, is part of the service, and installation costs are covered by Vodacom. The plans, which are tailored to meet the needs of all sizes of business, offer a range of connection speeds from 5Mbps to 100Mbps.

In future, Vodacom will offer customers the option of installing additional equipment in their premises to, in effect, set up a dedicated mini mobile base station. This equipment uses the fibre connection to route cellphone traffic back into the network.

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