Dark Fibre Africa officially launches network

23 June 2009

Telecommunications infrastructure provider Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) on Tuesday formally launched its network, which would provide data and video broadband services, including voice.

The launch will be done in collaboration with networking space leader Cisco Systems.

The launch marked a milestone for DFA, which creating an open access dark fibre network in metropolitan areas, with over 800 km of fibre optics cable laid in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town.

DFA owns, builds, maintains, secures and monitors the dark fibre network and has to date, made private sector investment of R1,5-billion in the network infrastructure.

DFA manager of sales and marketing Malcolm Kirby said in a statement that individual service providers would now be able to lease fibre optic cable from DFA. "The dark fibre is then 'lit' by each service operator when they deliver new high-speed services to their customers."

With the launch, DFA planned to introduce a new phenomenon called hyperband, which would provide enough capacity to accommodate all networks, allowing mobile operators to improve the quality of their service.

Cisco's internet business solutions group’s Reshaad Sha noted that the evolution of the Internet towards next generation networks (NGN), coupled with the large scale deployment of broadband, social networks and video services have fueled an exponential bandwidth growth at the transport layer which service providers in South Africa have began to experience.

"Internationally, this exponential growth of traffic at the transport layer has led major service providers around the globe to consider the move from 1G to 10G to 40G and beyond service based offerings."

Moreover, the dynamic nature of bandwidth requirement along with its ever-changing traffic pattern, dictated a more flexible, resilient and cost effective NGN architecture across the metro, regional and long distance network environment.

"This is where a strong partnership between Cisco and DFA becomes relevant, to jointly assist customers to build networks in ways that enhance the resiliency and the survivability of their networks as they increase their capacity carrying mission critical data," added Sha.

DFA's open access network eliminated the need for each operator to create its own cable network, the company said.

"DFA's network was designed with excess capacity to accommodate all service providers and it is no longer necessary for any additional trenches to be dug by service providers where DFA already has a network. This dramatically reduces the disruption of road traffic and municipal services and allows operators to provide their services far more rapidly to customers" Kirby stated.