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Africa considers FTTH

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Johannesburg, 09 Sept 2009

Fibre to the home (FTTH) is only in its starting phase in Africa, however, according to the FTTH Council Europe, it is a sustainable technology for connecting African communities.

Fibre to the home or fibre to the business refers to high-capacity fibre optic cable rolled out directly to the home or business premises. The FTTH Council Europe says the infrastructure has the potential to deliver extremely fast Internet connection speeds of 100Mbps, providing access to multimedia-rich applications and services.

Nadia Babaali, communications director for the FTTH Council Europe, believes wide deployment of FTTH in Africa is possible as bandwidth limitations and bottlenecks are removed. “The highest impact of FTTH deployment is in African rural areas where a lot of people can get access to services they didn't have access to in the past.

“Businesses looking to relocate to larger cities can be retained. African governments are keen to bring the Internet to the people to benefit the economy. It also opens the way for the development of new services that will add value to society.”

Pie in the sky

Bill Hearmon, chairman of the Africa CDMA Forum, pointed to the infrastructure dilemma, saying FTTH is not a feasible solution in Africa. “Just because you can drive a Ferrari at high speed doesn't mean that Africa needs it. Running fibre to every single home and village in Africa is not going to happen.”

Steven Ambrose, MD of World Wide Worx Strategy, says most of Africa is very distributed, and this works against city wide roll-outs of FTTH. “Where it will gain traction is in gated communities and certain cohesive communities such as suburbs in major cities.”

Ambrose believes wireless technologies will bring Internet to the masses, rather than FTTH. He adds FTTH will remain a premium service available to the top-end of the market, with satellite remaining the main delivery mechanism of television in most of Africa, until at least 2020.

“The main hurdle is scale and cost. Essentially, the price of fibre must come down significantly below copper, and the ageing copper infrastructure for telecommunications, where it exists, will then be replaced by fibre. The issue is that fixed-line penetration is dropping as mobile is increasing,” suggests Ambrose.

Commitment hurdles

Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, says the issue is not so much about sustainability as initial affordability and overall telecoms policy. “The biggest cost in FTTH is the initial trenching and laying of cables, with trenching being the core cost. Once it's in the ground, and paid for, the sustainability issue largely goes away.

“However, if the financial model is that users must fund the initial installation on a long-term basis, then you have major sustainability issues.”

According to Goldstuck, another pitfall is that there's little political commitment to affordable, accessible, quality telecoms for all. He points to the R40-billion arms deal, which didn't benefit the public, and notes that the same kind of investment would transform telecommunications in the country.

“In the longer term, the fibre networks being laid down across our cities to link in to the new undersea cables will create the initial infrastructure from which FTTH will emerge. FTTH will make it possible to feed not only an individual home's complete telecoms and broadcast needs from that one connection, but in fact to feed a community of homes around that one access point.

“At 100Mbps, an FTTH connection into one street could meet the bandwidth needs of that entire street, covering any of the range of fixed-line phone, cellular phone, broadband Internet, VOIP, IP-TV, backup, security monitoring, WiFi and cable TV services.”

In SA, only 1 058 million people, less than 2.5% of the South African population, are broadband users, according to the FTTH Council Europe.

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