City of Joburg broadband network to go live 1 July

Musa Nkosi, BWired CEO, says the principle behind this network was to provide ICT communications at a vastly lower cost.

---

The City of Joburg Broadband Project will go live on 1 July 2013 after a three-year build phase.

The city-wide fibre optic network will be operated for 12 years by BWired, a partnership between the City of Johannesburg and Ericsson created to implement the project.

The 1.2Tb, 940km network was designed by Ericsson South Africa and gives Joburg a 'smart city' status, says BWired. It will be able to offer key services immediately to all municipal buildings connected to the network, states BWired in a press release issued earlier today.

"The Johannesburg Broadband and Network Project (JBNP) is the realisation of the city's long-term vision of developing the city's economy which will see the positive stimulation of opportunities for the business sector in terms of small to medium enterprises, effective access to public services, the development of the youth in Johannesburg and increased employment opportunities for all," says the release.

"All civil work was completed at the end of April 2013, with the fibre installation work being at 90% completion at this time. The network build will be completed at the end of May 2013. When the network goes live on 1 July 2013, it will offer full WAN accessibility, VPN services, and will bring internet to all of the CoJ buildings in the region. The JBNP will be service ready to transition all of the agreed upon services as of 1 July 2013."

Musa Nkosi, BWired CEO, says the principle behind the network was to provide ICT communications at a vastly lower cost, not only reducing the CoJ's communications costs, but enabling the rest of the residents of the city to benefit from the network roll out.

Although connecting all of its buildings, the CoJ will only use a small percentage of the projected network capacity, meaning other telecoms service providers, and industry at large can plug into the remaining capacity on a wholesale and open access basis.

Nkosi says BWired is already working with one of country's largest mobile service providers with over 200 sites connected and operational to date. "We are also running a number of POC's with Tier 1 ISPs, as well as other network operators."

BWired will provide services and maintenance to three environments: the CoJ network, dark fibre and lit fibre. "The bulk of our attention will be with CoJ - it is a big user environment," said Nkosi in a 2011 Brainstorm interview. "It requires a dedicated team to focus on that. We won't have too much time to still compete with other lit fibre providers."

As part of its economic goals, the city intends to sell most of the network capacity by way of some unusually flexible dark and lit fibre models.

But dark fibre buyers will have to install costly networking capabilities themselves, while lit fibre does not require the same investment from buyers. Both models should create greater competition among telecoms service providers.