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Frogfoot to deploy fibre to 85 000 homes by 2018

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 23 Jun 2017
Frogfoot co-founder and MD Abraham van der Merwe.
Frogfoot co-founder and MD Abraham van der Merwe.

Vox subsidiary Frogfoot Networks has secured funding to deploy fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) to 15 000 homes in Gauteng and the Western Cape as part of a 24-month roll-out programme.

This is part of the open access fibre network provider's aggressive FTTH expansion plans to deploy fibre to 85 000 homes by 2018.

"We are currently in the process of building the infrastructure to over 16 000 homes, and with the additional funding are now able to fast-track the deployment to 15 100 homes in 2017," says Abraham van der Merwe, co-founder and MD of Frogfoot.

"2018 will see the deployment of the remaining 53 300 homes, although it is likely this figure will grow substantially as the demand for FTTH continues. There is a massive appetite for fibre in South Africa, which is mainly driven by the current state of the existing cabled network that is simply not meeting the needs of the consumer. Today, users want high-speed, uninterrupted connectivity at work and home, and it is this frustration that is driving fervent demand," he adds.

Frogfoot sees huge growth potential in the FTTH sector and says that as traditional content consumption habits evolve to become increasingly push-based, the bandwidth requirements can only realistically be delivered over fibre.

"Viewing push content using a DSL link is challenging and while switching to high-speed LTE is the obvious option, it is a pricey alternative. Also, LTE - fixed or WiFi - will never give the bandwidth capacity that fibre offers and simply won't meet demand," he says.

Van der Merwe explains the addressable FTTH market is between three million and six million homes, which means Frogfoot currently has 2% market saturation.

"Although deployment is driven by the commercial viability of the project and consumer demand, there remains huge untapped possibility," concludes Van der Merwe.

Frogfoot is a wholly-owned subsidiary of integrated ICT and connectivity provider Vox and is funded by Rand Merchant Bank, Investec and Metier Capital, with group revenue exceeding R1 billion per annum.

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