BWired, the company created by Ericsson and the City of Johannesburg to build a city-wide fibre network, says it is on course for an early 2012 switch-on.

The network will connect 500 buildings owned by the city, with remaining capacity made available to commercial players in early 2013. The network will eventually have more than 1 000km of fibre-optic cable.

Andy Martins, Ericsson’s head of industry and government for sub-Saharan Africa, says the city will use up only 15% of the network’s capacity, with the remaining 85% available to lease.

He says the capacity could make the roll-out of next-generation long-term evolution, or LTE, networks — which require fibre backhaul between base stations — far faster for operators like MTN that are already testing the technology. Martins says “negotiations are underway” with mobile operators but won’t comment further because the negotiations are ongoing.

“The city network core is almost complete and we will be lighting it up before the end of the year,” says Martins. “Traffic is expected to start moving over the network early in 2012.”

He says BWired is three months ahead of schedule with the fibre build and the company is “already extending some of the uses of [the network] to additional places that weren’t part of the original plan”.

The network is being extended to include traditionally underserviced areas around the city, including Diepsloot, Alexandra and Soweto.

Martins says the speed of the network has far larger capacity than anything SA has seen before. This stems from the fact that BWired is laying 96 fibre strands in each trench. “To put that in context, the Sat-3 undersea cable consists of four fibres and that carries all of West Africa’s traffic to Europe.”

The initiative is essentially a self-funding project because it is based on a “build, operate and transfer agreement” whereby BWired will become a municipal-owned entity when the network is complete.

“The concept was to take what the city was paying service providers and use that operating expense to build this network.” Martins says Ericsson hopes to replicate the projects in other cities in SA and across Africa. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral