Vumatel, the company that won the project to deploy fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband in Parkhurst in Johannesburg, broke first ground on the project on Monday. The first trench was dug in a street outside Parkhurst Primary School.

The fibre telecommunications start-up intends rolling out high-speed fibre to as many as 200 000 homes in the next three to four years at a cost of between R2bn and R3bn.

“Our ambition is to roll out to 200 000 houses over the next three to four years, which equates to about 100 suburbs,” says Vumatel CEO Niel Schoeman.

In all, it will trench 56km of fibre to reach the 2 100 homes in Parkhurst.

The company will install a distribution box at the boundary of every home. Consumers will then decide if they want access to the network. If they do, they can have an installer lay the fibre into their houses, or they can buy the kit they need from a shop that’s been opened in the suburb and do the installation themselves.

The first residents will have access to “lit” fibre during the last week of October. Fibre will then be connected to an access point inside the resident’s property, which will give them access to services such as Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet ports.

“When a user signs in for the first time, they will be greeted by a splash page that lists the various service provider options that they can subscribe to,” says Schoeman. Most of the service providers will offer month-to-month contracts giving users the flexibility to change if they are unhappy. Schoeman says the splash page will also list other services that will be made available to residents.