Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) has invested over R800 million to upgrade and future-proof its national fibre network.
In a statement, DFA says this investment strengthens its position as a key wholesale open-access connectivity provider in SA and addresses the growing demand for reliable, high-speed internet.
DFA is part of the Maziv group. Its national network delivers connectivity and backhaul for mobile operators, data centres, internet service providers and public sector institutions.
The investment follows DFA’s R400 million dry underground distribution cabinet network enhancement project launched in August 2023, which focused on stabilising and future-proofing DFA’s network infrastructure.
This has already delivered measurable results, including a 40% improvement in new circuit delivery times and a 100% improvement in mean time to repair (MTTR), where the new architecture is operational, says the company.
“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,” says Andreas Uys, CTO of Maziv.
“We’re also enabling higher line speeds and increasing available capacity to meet the changing needs of our customers.
“With the new architecture supported by a recently consolidated project management office (PMO), we are focused on reducing delivery times, while driving high-quality service. Our target this year is to deliver up to 2 500 connections per month.
“We could potentially deliver fibre connectivity to buildings already on our network within 14 days, and to non-connected buildings within 55 days. These upgrades and changes in our PMO are critical to meeting the increasing demand for fast, stable internet services.”
While in late 2022, customers complained about network instability and slower service delivery, Dewald Booysen, COO of Maziv, highlights the improvements the firm has made in the customer experience.
“We’ve worked tirelessly to address these challenges. 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.”
Booysen notes that maintaining a national network of over 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 says it has improved its MTTR by 100% through strategic interventions over the past 12 months.
“We are seeing consistent and predictable improvements month-on-month,” says Booysen.
“We have drastically improved the time taken to repair customer faults, while simultaneously delivering new circuits, conducting ongoing maintenance and deploying new network architecture.
“Of the 15 000km of fibre, about 40% of that infrastructure is in Gauteng, where we experienced the bulk of our challenges, which is just under 5 000km of fibre.”
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