{"id":14081,"date":"2012-05-30T23:07:01","date_gmt":"2012-05-30T21:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=14081"},"modified":"2012-05-31T11:54:40","modified_gmt":"2012-05-31T09:54:40","slug":"adsl-versus-ftth-battle-in-sa-emerging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/14081\/adsl-versus-ftth-battle-in-sa-emerging\/","title":{"rendered":"ADSL versus FTTH battle in SA emerging"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first fibre-to-the-home (FTTH)<\/a> services are emerging in South Africa, and even Telkom<\/a> is embarking on an FTTH proof of concept to replace their existing ADSL<\/a> infrastructure.<\/p>\n

ATEC Systems and Technologies<\/a> unveiled its Maboneng fibre network recently, offering broadband, managed internet, TV and telephony services.<\/p>\n

This follows an announcement in January 2012 that ATEC had completed the first phase of a fibre network rollout to create South Africa\u2019s first non-gated fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) community in Clifton, Cape Town.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe FTTH network is designed to be future proof, central to the IP-centric future of the east-side precinct, providing network speeds of up to 100Mbps on standard installations and up to 1024Mbps on customized installations,\u201d said ATEC commercial director, Gerhard Loots<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ATEC\u2019s pricing is currently in-line with Telkom\u2019s ADSL offerings, but because of the scalability of FTTH (with speeds of up to 1Gbps), it is only a matter of time before FTTH provides far better value for money than ADSL.<\/p>\n

Telkom is well-aware that it needs to boost its fixed-line broadband value proposition, and the company is already improving its ADSL network and is planning to start piloting FTTH services.<\/p>\n

In March 2012 Telkom officially announced that it has begun rolling out 3,700 multi-service access nodes (MSANs)<\/a> that will replace 2,700 older generation cabinets and add another 1,000 to their number.<\/p>\n

Alphonzo Samuels<\/a>, managing executive for network infrastructure provisioning, explained that MSANs can be used to offer higher speed ADSL (ADSL 2+), very-high-bit-rate digital subscriber line (VDSL)<\/a>, and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) services.<\/p>\n

It is understood that Telkom will replace their ADSL infrastructure with fibre in the trial areas, and will hence offer subscribers with VoIP services instead of traditional copper-based telephony products.<\/p>\n

Dark Fibre Africa (DFA)<\/a> CEO, Gustav Smit<\/a> called on Internet service providers (ISPs) to invest in last mile fibre infrastructure to provide services like FTTH.<\/p>\n

DFA provides open access fibre infrastructure which can be used to provide services like fibre broadband connections. \u201cThis enables licensed mobile operators and ISPs like Vodacom<\/a>, MTN<\/a>, Cell C<\/a>, Internet Solutions<\/a> and MWEB<\/a> to give communities access to the network.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smit has called on ISPs to play a leading role in mobilising communities. \u201cEnd-users simply don\u2019t know what 20Mbps or 100Mbps to the home means. An opportunity needs to be created for users to test drive serious broadband.\u201d<\/p>\n

Related articles<\/strong><\/p>\n

Telkom ADSL speed upgrades on track<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

DFA to invest R75 million in Benoni<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Build it and they will come<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Dark Fibre Africa bringing fibre to George<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fibre to the home (FTTH) is far from becoming widely available in South Africa, but the first fibre broadband rollouts are emerging<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[1757,1758,26,65],"class_list":["post-14081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-dfa","tag-gustav-smit","tag-headline","tag-telkom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14081"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14120,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081\/revisions\/14120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}