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Dreaming big?

Will SA ever get fibre to the home connectivity?

Samantha Perry
By Samantha Perry, co-founder of WomeninTechZA
Johannesburg, 27 Jan 2012

Broadband is big business, world over. The purists would argue that a lot of what is punted as broadband in SA isn't actually broad at all. And while things have improved both in terms of the quality, cost and availability of broadband services, SA still doesn't compare to markets like the UK's, for example, where broadband is faster, cheaper and easier to acquire. Will SA ever get that holy grail of connections - fibre to the home (FTTH)? Or is it a pipe dream?

In this month's 'On the Spot' series, Brainstorm polled the experts for their views.

- South Africans are no different to Internet users in any developed market in terms of the type of content they want to consume, and that will ultimately drive the demand for FTTH. Just over a year ago, most South Africans would have said that uncapped ADSL was a pipe dream, and yet look what has happened in the last 18 months. We certainly have some challenges to overcome, but we're a nation of great innovators and we'll find a model that makes commercial sense - for both operators and consumers. Derek Hershaw, CEO, MWeb ISP

- It's a pipe dream. Mobile and fixed-line broadband are in a constant battle to outplay each other, and the fact of the matter is that, currently, mobile is winning. I believe that fibre will not be taken to the curb, but rather remain as backhaul capacity as we use it currently. With the advance of 4G with speeds of 100Mbps, and in the next couple of years 5G, with speeds estimated at 1 000Mbps, the speed difference between mobile and fibre grows ever smaller, with the advantage that mobile won't require last-mile deployment. Marnus Viljoen, CTO at FOXit

- One should rather ask, 'What is the price we're willing to pay to step up to the next branch of the information-age evolutionary tree?' If streaming HD video is a reality, what more could we possibly want or need? To date, a large void exists between the potential of an Internet connection in every home, and what is actually being attained. We have not come close to utilising the potential of universal connectivity beyond social networking and video-streaming. Home automation and monitoring, integration into emergency services, even pre-emptive diagnostics and reporting between appliances and manufacturers are but a few ideas that suffered of SIDS and never moved beyond the incubation stage.

One should rather ask, 'What is the price we're willing to pay to step up to the next branch of the information-age evolutionary tree?'

Liam Terblanche, Accsys

We have created a society hell-bent on consuming snippets of information at a blinding rate, with no desire to do something with it. Let's get copper or wireless connectivity into every home in SA, ensuring a confluence of collective intelligence across all walks of life, instead of pushing the envelope in the affluent areas, and letting the rest of our country fall even further behind. Liam Terblanche, CIO, Accsys

- The dream is becoming reality in the larger metropolises of SA - Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg. All three cities now have various fibre networks being lit as and when required. If one has the requirement and there is fibre in the vicinity, it can be provisioned. The issue is no longer if, it is at what cost?

The pricing is varied among players in the metro space - B Wired (Citi Connect - Johannesburg), eThekweni Metroconnect (Durban) and Metro Fibre (Cape Town ), along with Telkom, Vodacom, Neotel and MTN. The city metros offer the most cost-effective options. Typically, the minimum provisioning is for a 2Mb dedicated link, with packages available for capped, uncapped, local only, international and blended Internet breakout. Even so, the most compelling solution still depends on the location of the respective fibre rings relative to one's home - the last mile yet again!

Gated communities are likely to become viable first, with fibre being provisioned to the gatehouse, consolidating the total community requirement. The estates then have the ability to provision the internal last mile on wireless, copper or fibre. Vaughan Humphrey, ONEdotCOM, MD: ISP

- FTTH first became commercially viable over a decade ago and is growing in popularity internationally. In fact, according to market analyst RVA LLC, FTTH is available to more than 20 million homes in North America, and the number of homes connected to all fibre networks now exceeds seven million. Locally, FTTH is an exciting prospect but has a unique set of challenges, especially geographical dispersion of consumers. This, coupled with the expectation of low subscription rates, will limit deployment and slow uptake. However, we are likely to experience a similar uptake to international markets in the years to come, given the number of initiatives being implemented by municipalities and telecoms organisations to connect businesses and houses to metro-fibre networks. Edwin Thompson, GM of technology and Infrastructure, MTN Business

- It's not a pipe dream, but the high cost of building a new last mile fibre network is a reality. Once in place, we'll see rollout in high-density, more affluent areas first. For fibre to become competitive in the market, it'll need to enable value-added lifestyle services like video on demand, gaming and voice services. Data pricing is dropping to levels close to the input cost, which means the increased last mile cost of fibre needs to be subsidised through cleverly bundled value-added services. High-speed fibre will enable lifestyle applications that don't exist today - that's the promise fibre brings. Rob Gilmour, MD, RSAWEB

First published in the November 2011 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.

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