Telcos team up for fibre

Johannesburg, 21 Nov 2008

Vodacom will partner with MTN and Neotel to build a national fibre network. The mobile operator declined to give details about the partnership, but confirmed talks were in progress.

“Discussions between parties are still ongoing and we would not want to jeopardise these talks by commenting prematurely. Over the next 12 months, Vodacom will be rolling out transmission networks in more big cities across SA, including Durban and Cape Town,” said Dot Field, chief communications officer for Vodacom Group.

This collaboration follows the recent opening of Vodacom's R100 million data centre and moves by telecoms operators to invest in their own infrastructure, such as the recent roll-out of fibre by Vodacom and Neotel in various parts of the country.

The data centre, in Midrand, hosts up to 20 000 dedicated client servers and is designed to host mission-critical computer systems. Vodacom plans to build similar facilities in Cape Town and Durban. These three data centres will be connected via a national fibre backbone to create, what the company hopes will be, a robust and redundant data hosting network.

MTN, which previously announced it would seek partnerships to create a national fibre network, also confirmed the talks.

“When MTN announced its intention to build a fibre network, we have always said we welcome additional partners in the project. We look forward to finalising the agreements to this effect within the next two weeks,” says MTN MD Tim Lowry.

Neotel CEO Ajay Pandey said in a statement: “We can confirm that we are in the final stages of working out the modalities of joint infrastructure build with MTN. Our stated position has not changed with regard to the active infrastructure sharing among service providers. It has been established globally that such initiatives and partnership have contributed to bringing down the cost of telecommunications. We will share more details as we reach closure of the contract.”

Recently, four of Vodacom's fibre rings - Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein - have gone live and begun carrying network traffic.