The FTTH/B (fibre to the home/business) landgrab is well and truly underway. Neighbourhoods across South Africa are inundated with holes, digging, orange bunting and assurances of speeds so fast, laptops will catch fire. According to BMI-TechKnowledge, FTTH could potentially hit the 360 000 active subscription milestone by 2019, with growth driven predominantly by residential suburbs. This statistic is largely due to the level of fibre investment that has taken place over the past year with Vumatel, Telkom, MTN, Dark Firbre Africa and Vodacom, among others, aggressively pushing for space and fibre domination. Fibre is in the home, the business and the city and has the ability to transform the workplace and potentially shift traditional boundaries and entrenched ways of working.
"Not only does FTTH offer faster home connectivity than any other technology, but fibre has a much lower latency, making the interaction with web servers and services from a home environment much more responsive and the environment more productive," says Abraham van der Merwe, MD, Frogfoot Networks. "Adoption of new technologies is driven by people, not companies. Today, personal devices are common place in the corporate environment, yet this was strictly prohibited not so long ago. Technology tends to impact human behaviour which, in turn, influences corporate behaviour, not the other way around. There will be some companies that are slower to adapt to the demands of their workforce."
FTTH is an enabler for remote working and can potentially see employees become more productive and enterprises more profitable. Companies would still have access to their employees, but overall wellbeing would rise alongside attendance and commitment. This is held up by research that has shown that employers can run the risk of losing around $1.8 trillion in lost productivity annually thanks to poor employee engagement, stress, health problems and parent juggling. On the flip side, two thirds of organisations saw increased productivity when people were allowed to work from home, as employees continued to work when sick and managed their admin without losing a full day of work. Remote work can also lower stress, boost morale and reduce employee turnover.
Says Reshaad Sha, chief strategy officer at DFA: "According to a recent Citrix flexible workforce report, should organisational culture in South Africa evolve to embrace a flexible workforce, there would be savings in commuter costs of R39.5 billion, with a reduction of 320 million hours spent travelling to and from work annually."
Overcoming culture
Of course, for a remote workforce to become a functioning reality, there must be high-speed connectivity and collaboration across the industry. Says Sha: "The provision of an open access wholesale solution will address the issue of duplicate fibre deployment, which we're currently experiencing as multiple service providers race to grab the most lucrative areas. Collaboration is the solution to ensuring nationwide high-speed connectivity as a utility, not as a luxury."
There is little doubt that FTTH/B can ignite the shift from workplace to home space when it comes to working, but there are still some who think that this is unlikely to happen any time soon in South Africa.
"At the moment, connectivity is not reliable enough in all areas to access the cloud systems that companies are increasingly using as part of their day-to-day operations," says Brendan Pronk, chief commercial officer, Comsol. "To see FTTH become effective in changing the corporate landscape, it has to be available in all areas where employees live and this won't necessarily be the likes of Sandton and major metros, which is where many of the rollouts have been focused."
The smaller business, the startup and the fresh-faced entrepreneurial ing'enue are far more likely to adopt the benefits and opportunities offered by remote working and the connectivity of FTTH. They are finding it easier to adapt to teleworking and teleconferencing and to adopt it as part of their corporate culture. The larger corporate, however, is still set in its ways.
Says Pronk: "South African culture is to look people in the eye, so face-to-face meetings are still the standard. However, younger workers are embracing the digital side of things far more so this may well change in the future. Also, different segments are more flexible, such as call centre workers, developers, online sales people et al, where there is room for them to work from home."
Calvin Collett, CEO, iConnect Telecoms, agrees: "It's a massive step we have to take together and, right now, most corporates aren't ready. Fibre infiltration in South Africa only started in October 2015 and while there has been massive uptake, it's still too early to say."
A remote future
Until now, most organisations have had to endure the fun of DSL with copper degradation, distance from the exchange, attenuation and theft all impacting on quality and performance. With fibre, however, these challenges are a thing of the past as connectivity is consistent and reliable - if it's a 100Mbps connection, then that's what you get. This is something of a novelty in South Africa...
"I think 18 months from now we'll be having different conversations," says Collett. "We'll have large areas of the metropolitan fibred up and customers will be using those fibre connections. At that point it will be a worthwhile conversation to have with your employer because there's no excuse for downtime."
The story of fibre in South Africa has really just begun. It's introducing new levels of capability for the organisation and igniting new ways of thinking when it comes to productivity, solutions and accessibility. Cloud infrastructure can reach its potential and the Internet of Things has room to expand into corporate and personal innovation. Fibre is bringing a more stable, reliable and faster level of connectivity that makes accessing tools like Skype, e-mail and cloud-based services easier and quicker, and it's outstripping ADSL in terms of uptake and efficiency.
"In the US, there's been a 26% increase in the number of jobs posted online offering jobs that entail work from home, with companies like Amazon, Kaplan, First Data and Convergys taking the lead in the last year," says Juanita Clark, CEO, FTTH Council South Africa. "This says that companies are realising the benefits. In fact, in one study, over 48% of the general workforce said they would take a salary cut if they could work from home. It's simply a matter of time, and the mind-set to let go of full control."
This article was first published in the August 2016 edition of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine. To read more, go to the Brainstorm website.
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