Within 18 months, SA will experience a broadband and communications boom not witnessed since the Internet growth years of the late 1990s.

That’s the view of Vodacom Business managing executive Ermano Quartero, who says that by then 400Mbit/s and higher connections into businesses will be commonplace and 10Mbit/s into the home will become the new standard.

The boom in connectivity will be driven by investments in fibre-optic cables and by new wireless networks, especially those using long-term evolution (LTE), the eventual successor technology to the third-generation networks currently deployed by the mobile operators.

The high-capacity undersea cables already built and those currently under construction, especially the 5,1Tbit/s West African Cable System (Wacs) due to come on-stream in a year, will also have a dramatic impact on the country’s telecommunications growth, Quartero believes.

“When Wacs happens, and we have backhaul fibre into to the landing station and fibre to clients and across the country, that’s when we will enter the true broadband fibre era in SA,” he says. “And it’s probably only 18 months away. Before you know it, we’ll be there.”

Quartero says the broadband boom will result in big investments in cloud computing, where companies — and even retail consumers — use online applications hosted in giant air-conditioned data centres run by telecoms operators and Internet service providers.

Mobile operators like Vodacom, meanwhile, will have to reinvent their businesses. In future, Quartero says, they won’t be able to make much money from telephone calls.

Vodacom is deploying thousands of kilometres of fibre, with plans eventually to hook up a big percentage of its base stations to its own high-capacity backhaul network. The operator has said it will hook up about 1 000 of its towers to its own fibre backhaul network during the current financial year. MTN has similar plans.

They’re rolling out this infrastructure, Quartero says, in preparation for the launch of LTE and, eventually, 4G wireless networks offering speeds in excess of 100Mbit/s over the air.

“Vodacom Business has installed microwave high sites that sit on Vodacom’s fibre network,” Quartero says. It’s using microwave connections to provide sub-2Mbit/s access to small and medium enterprises directly into its fibre backbone.

For larger organisations, it’s begun deploying fibre directly. It has installed a 1Gbit/s fibre line for the State IT Agency and a similar connection for the SA Police Service. Both are using the high-capacity links to connect their data centres with off-site disaster recovery facilities.

Eventually, Quartero says companies will be able to provide gigabit per second connections between SA major cities, not only between points in the same cities. But that’s only once new national networks, currently being built, are ready for service.

But he says investments in fibre are already resulting in more companies — including big corporate entities — deploying mission-critical business applications in the cloud. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral