DFA opens office in Zimbabwe

Issued by Dark Fibre Africa
Johannesburg, 05 Mar 2019

DFA opened an office in Harare, Zimbabwe today, marking its first network expansion into African markets outside of SA. The DFA Zimbabwe operations are headed up by Simon Chimutsotso, a seasoned executive with extensive experience in rolling out telecommunications infrastructure in Zimbabwe, Zambia and SA. An accomplished executive team will support him in planning and deploying the initial sections of the high-speed Zimbabwean network, which will be made available on a wholesale open-access commercial offering.

"DFA pioneered the wholesale open-access model in SA more than a decade ago and has demonstrated its viability by attracting leading mobile network operators, Tier 1 Internet service providers and public sector customers as anchor tenants on its network," says Vino Govender, Executive for Strategy, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Innovation at DFA in SA.

"We have rolled out network infrastructure in all of the major South African metropolitan areas and have extended our footprint to large and small towns, amounting to over 13 000 km of ducting space. Our entry into Zimbabwe is in line with our strategic intent of expanding into sub-Saharan and other African markets."

Chimutsotso says that following the announcement of the expansion of DFA's operations into Zimbabwe last year, the team has spent the past few months working on feasibility and compliance readiness. "We now stand primed to deliver a reliable and cost-efficient open-access network and a high-quality service, which underlines the DFA customer-centric values."

Chimutsotso adds that DFA Zimbabwe will build on the extensive experience from its South African counterpart to give, among others, Zimbabwean telecommunications operators and Internet service providers access to the same premium connectivity infrastructure that DFA SA is known for. "We are excited to build our customer base in this new territory and at the investment opportunity and value to be derived by the telecommunications sector of Zimbabwe and the economy at large."

DFA

Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) is a premium-quality, open-access fibre infrastructure and connectivity provider in southern Africa. It finances, builds, installs, manages and maintains a world-class fibre network to transmit metro and long-haul telecommunications traffic. It started rolling out its fibre network in SA in 2007, and to date has deployed over 13 000km of ducting infrastructure in major South African metros, secondary cities and smaller towns. The network runs with an industry-leading uptime of 99.98%. DFA leases its secure transmission and backbone fibre infrastructure and provides associated connectivity services to telecommunications operators, Internet service providers, media conglomerates, tertiary education institutions, municipalities, government organisations and other businesses, large and small, on equal terms.

Editorial contacts