Maziv, the parent of Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) and Vumatel, said on Tuesday that DFA has spent more than R800-million upgrading and “futureproofing” its national fibre network after major service delivery problems impacted clients.

The investment comes even as it has slowed Vumatel’s fibre-to-the-home buildout as it awaits the outcome of protracted regulatory processes related to Vodacom’s multibillion-rand planned investment for a 30-40% co-controlling stake in Maziv. The Vodacom transaction was blocked by the Competition Tribunal last week, and will now be the subject of an appeal to the competition appeal court.

The R800-million investment into DFA’s network follows its R400-million “dry underground distribution cabinet” project, launched in August 2023, which aimed to “stabilise and modernise” its network infrastructure, Maziv said in a statement on Tuesday.

That investment has led to a 40% improvement in new circuit delivery times and a 100% improvement in mean time to repair in areas where the new architecture is operational, Maziv said of the DFA upgrades.

“We have improved the average number of new circuits delivered from 800 to 1 500 per month. In one month, we delivered nearly 2 000 new connections – a record for us,” said Maziv chief technology officer Andreas Uys in the statement. “We’re also enabling higher line speeds and increasing available capacity to meet the changing needs of our customers.”

The investments come after DFA faced a customer backlash in 2022 over network instability and poor service delivery.

Uptime

“We’ve worked tirelessly to address these challenges,” said Maziv chief operations officer Dewald Booysen. “Our network upgrades have vastly improved resilience and diversity in the network. We still maintained a national uptime of over 99.5%, even during high-incident periods. Currently we’re performing at an exceptional 99.99% uptime.

Read: EFF breathes fire over Vodacom’s Maziv deal

“Maintaining a national network of more than 15 000km can be challenging, with force majeure events – such as third-party construction damage, vandalism, copper theft, severe weather and other environmental factors – more than doubling in the past two years. Despite these challenges, DFA has improved its mean time to repair by 100% through strategic interventions over the past 12 months,” Booysen added.

He said the problems were predominantly in Gauteng and not across the entire country. “Of the 15 000km of fibre, about 40% of that infrastructure is in Gauteng, where we experienced the bulk of our challenges.”

He said the key fixes that have been implemented include:

The introduction of dedicated service management points of contact for customers;
A new consolidated project office driving improved delivery timelines; and

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