Twenty-four companies have responded to the City of Cape Town's request for information (RFI) to roll out its planned R400 million fibre optic cable network.
A city spokesman says the responses received from the companies would be scored according to an established system, meaning the municipality had not committed itself to shortening the list to any specific number yet.
"A lot depends on the points spread. If companies score very closely to each other then we will consider them to be short-listed," he says.
The spokesman says the city typically looks for competitive pricing as a major criteria and this may extend the shortlist.
He says the city plans to begin rolling out the fibre-optic cable as soon as possible, but that no actual date of commencement has been set yet.
The RFI documents were "very thick", says the spokesman, and it may take some time to consider them.
Laying the fibre optic cable will involve capabilities the City of Cape Town may not have, the spokesman says.
"These include studying the environmental and economic effects of laying the cable."
The environmental effects are expected to be limited as fibre optic cables do not emit radiation, but the laying of the cable may necessitate digging trenches and then the issue of contiguous land can be a problem, the spokesman says.
He says a separate economic impact assessment may be done on the job creation aspects of laying the fibre optic cable.
The companies that have submitted RFIs are:
1. Aberdare Cables
2. BM Telecoms Data Cabling
3. Bridging Technologies Cape
4. CCI Technology Solutions
5. Charles Kuun Consultancy
6. Citrine Construction
7. Community Investment Ventures
8. Cueincident Operations Western Cape
9. Dimension Data
10. DynaTech Information Systems
11. Ericsson South Africa
12. GijimaAst Holdings
13. Global Pact Trading 3 T/A Orange Business Services and C2C Consulting Engineers
14. Guarduct
15. Interconnect Systems
16. Lungisa - VRG Telecommunications and Projects
17. MCT Telecommunications
18. Netsurit
19. RayCape CC
20. Telkom
21. Tellumat
22. Transtel division of Transnet
23. Venture Communications
24. Vodacom
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