Vodacom has chosen French telecoms equipment provider Alcatel-Lucent to facilitate fibre to businesses and consumers.
Vodacom's new "converged" fibre network will be set up in all major centres in SA - including Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban - and will enable Vodacom to offer mobile, voice, video and data services to both homes and businesses.
Alcatel-Lucent today announced it had been selected by the mobile operator to build its fibre-to-the-home network in SA, with a coverage target of 250 000 premises within the next three years.
"Alcatel-Lucent's gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) solution [will] underpin the ultra-broadband network for enterprise, residential and mobile customers of SA's largest mobile operator," the company said in a statement.
"The new converged network enables Vodacom to provide customers with ultra-broadband needed to access bandwidth-hungry services and applications such as online gaming and streaming video."
Vodacom will deploy Alcatel-Lucent's comprehensive end-to-end GPON solution, as well as the Motive customer experience platform to provide "high-quality network performance" across both wireline and wireless.
The operator expects to reach about 150 000 homes and 100 000 business within the next three years.
Vodacom indicated in November last year that it intended going head-to-head with Telkom to become an alternative fixed-line option.
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