Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) is a crucial part of MTN's business, which - like all mobile operators - is seeing a shift from traditional services such as voice and SMS to multimedia, data-based usage.
MTN SA CEO Ahmad Farroukh says FTTH will take a chunk of the largely increased capital expenditure the company has allocated for its local business this year - R10 billion as opposed to 2014's R5.7 billion spend.
"FTTH is crucial for future opportunities, to maintain revenue growth and move away from traditional services. [Ultimately as], MTN we want to be able to offer customers with access to our FTTH one solution that will give [them] whatever they need at home - whether it be Internet, TV, music or security. Our FTTH product must tick the boxes of what people want."
MTN was the first operator in SA to reveal its FTTH plans, last April, when it demonstrated its new high-speed service to residents of Monaghan Farm, an upmarket gated estate just north of Lanseria Airport.
At the time, MTN said it was rolling out "aggressive deployment" of FTTH to high-density urban areas, like upmarket gated communities, boomed-off suburbs and high-rise buildings. The official commercial launch for the product was in June, while further residential sites are still in the pipeline.
Slow start
Farroukh says MTN was "late in launching [FTTH] because it was difficult to cut through the red tape when it came to some estates and suburbs. They all have different agencies and exclusivities, but our plans are clear as far as the next two years go. We have done our market capping; we know exactly how many neighbourhoods we plan to cover this year and next." He could not divulge details.
Although there was a lot of talk around FTTH last year, SA's operators were just starting to make inroads in terms of fibre-based broadband on a commercial scale.
Vodacom started planning an extensive fibre foray from as far back as 2013, at least. The company's CEO, Shameel Joosub, said in a video message in December 2013 that Vodacom was going to start building fibre to the home and business, and "really start trying to play a bigger role in the fixed space".
The operator plans to deploy fibre-to-the-premises in SA's four major centres - Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town - and aims to connect 250 000 homes and businesses within the next three years.
Telkom also announced plans and started making inroads on the fibre front last year, although 2014 did not see the progress many expected to see coming from this.
MTN says FTTH rollout is demand-driven, and is an extension of its established fibre connectivity backbone, which utilises Gigabit Passive Optical Network technology, to business parks and residential estates in all major cities.
Within 18 months, Farroukh says there will be "no coverage capacity technology differentiation between us and any player in the market". He says the operator is hard at work on network coverage, across the board, from 2G and 3G, to long-term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced.
Share