What is Dark Fibre Africa ?

Time to Market

Sophisticated network planning and collaboration with customer’s means that the DFA network is being constructed on the highest demand routes. This, together with the economies of scale realised by sharing common costs, means that DFA often anticipates its customers’ requirements and is able to provide access to a new route at short notice, often months or years in advance of what that customer could achieve on their own. The result for customers is increased revenues and improved competitive positioning.

Improved Business Agility

Using DFA’s shared ducting infrastructure enables customers to react rapidly to changes in their operating environment resulting from mergers or acquisitions, rapid introduction of new products and service offerings or changes in the regulatory environment. Customers are able to upscale or downscale their requirements far more rapidly or inexpensively than would be the case if they owned the entire transmission infrastructure.

Efficient Deployment of Capital

DFA's business model has been designed to ensure that customers enjoy maximum flexibility in the accounting treatment of their investment in network infrastructure. The tariff model ensures that this expenditure can be treated as capital, operational or a combination of the two. With DFA, customers can closely match their cost and revenue cycles and start billing their customers in the same month that they incur costs. They are also able to share fixed operational costs with all other DFA customers.

Total Cost of Ownership

The comprehensive package of a secure, managed ducting infrastructure with 24/7 fault monitoring, service level agreements, interfaces to roads and metro authorities and accurate documentation, enables providers of telecommunications to reduce operational costs and apply funds to activities that provide a competitive advantage.

Unified Interface to Regulatory Authorities

Obtaining the necessary approvals to undertake construction of infrastructure is a time consuming process. Delays are frequently encountered when multiple operators, along with other providers of utility services simultaneously plan to build infrastructure on the same routes. DFA's dedicated teams ensure that this time consuming process of securing right of way approvals can be short circuited and also provides an elegant solution to overstretched metro and roads authority planning agencies that have to deal with multiple applications on the same routes. Eighty percent of the cost of a fibre network is fixed in nature – the bulk of the cost pertains to civil works and not to the fibre optic cable itself. Civil construction is a once-off procedure. In Europe, the local authority generally only allows the telecoms provider a limited once-off time window to dig up the streets. The local authorities adopted this stance in response to the city residents becoming frustrated with disruptions to traffic flows.

Broad Network Coverage

DFA operates South Africa’s only metro and long haul telecommunications ducting infrastructure. Sharing the most expensive element of broadband infrastructure build, civil engineering costs, amongst multiple operators and the use of mechanised trenching technologies, enables DFA to provide its customers with a national infrastructure that they could not build on their own.