Dark Fibre Africa, the backbone fibre internet company owned by Maziv, which also owns Vumatel, has unveiled plans for further network upgrades to improve the stability of its network.
This comes after vandalism and other damage to its infrastructure caused “numerous outages”, affecting internet service providers and business customers last year and into this year.
Last August, DFA announced a R400-million fibre expansion project to deploy 800 “dry underground distribution cabinets” (DUDCs) in areas of high network density.
The latest announcement involves enhancing the DUDC project’s efficiency, the company said in a statement.
The roll-out will start in Gauteng, which it described as the “densest portion of our network”.
“We ran multiple rehabilitation initiatives in 2023 to bring stability back to the network in the wake of vandalism and third-party damage that caused numerous outages. These initiatives were largely successful but were a temporary measure in preparation for these major upgrades planned for 2024,” said Maziv chief operating officer Dewald Booysen in a statement.
“Our goal is to bridge over existing customers to the new infrastructure as quickly as possible,” added Maziv chief technology officer Andreas Uys.
‘Yellow cable’ project
“The first upgrade operation, the ‘yellow cable’ project, aims to reduce the number of access points that service teams use to perform maintenance and install new connections. By streamlining these processes, DFA can significantly boost network stability and resilience, and accelerate service delivery,” the company said.
“From a technical perspective, we are rebuilding the backhaul infrastructure from each DUDC unit to the closest aggregation node, as well as between core aggregation nodes. With the expanded capacity and ease of deploying new services directly to a DUDC unit, it will be faster and more cost-effective to build,” it said.
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“The second of the two projects, the ‘grey cable’ project, effectively separates DFA’s infrastructure from client infrastructure, and boosts DFA’s capacity to increase bandwidth speeds and provide new managed services more swiftly. It will also provide increased redundancy and route diversity, which offers an affordable protection to customers to prevent network isolation or losing network and internet connectivity.”
Booysen said several DUDCs are already live in the Gauteng South region, and that DFA plans to roll out complete DUDC coverage in 13 precincts within the region by the end of September.
“This is an aggressive target and will be dependent on several things going according to plan. We are also planning as much as we can for issues outside of our control, like vandalism, which diverts time and critical resources away from projects like this.
“DFA customers will receive constant communication regarding the progress of the roll-out of both the yellow and grey cable projects. Our goal is to be completely transparent and provide customers with tangible data showing the impact of these upgrades. They will be able to benchmark this progress against our stated targets for national network performance.” — © 2024 NewsCentral Media
