Johannesburg, 24 Nov 2022
Power users and home offices are dependent on high-performance connections to their homes, but cable theft, power outages, utility repairs and myriad other uniquely South African challenges can impact their connectivity and even cause it to fail altogether. The solution is to build in redundancy with two or more forms of connectivity.
This is according to Justin Colyn, Sales and Marketing Director at Comsol, who says South Africans have become too ‘fibre centric’, overlooking the alternatives.
“Over the past 10 years, we have seen eight or nine serious fibre network operators (FNOs) investing billions in rolling out infrastructure, yet we still only see fibre penetration to homes at around 10%. This is because it is not always viable to take fibre to every building. In our view, connectivity infrastructure might be seen as a tree, in which the roots are the undersea cables coming into the continent, the trunk and branches are main distribution networks and FNOs, and the leaves are fixed wireless access (FWA). Fibre won’t reach everywhere, but FWA takes fibre-like performance further, for complete coverage.”
Whether it is mobile, fixed mobile, FWA, fibre, satellite or any other technology, each one has its place in the market, he says.
“It doesn’t need to be a question of one or the other. For uninterrupted connectivity, we require multiple forms of fixed and wireless communication. In fact, as SD-WAN becomes more cost-effective, we foresee homes and home offices all having multiple forms of connectivity and little SD-WAN boxes at their homes, seamlessly bonding last-mile connections and switching them between the best available connections,” he predicts.
Best solutions for hedging your bets
While multiple options exist, Colyn says many consumers are confused about which options deliver the best performance and value.
He notes that many consumers are dazzled by 1Gbps fibre internet offerings, for example. “Aside from a minuscule proportion of people, ordinary homes and home offices don’t need pipes this big,” he says. “For HD streaming, you only need around 6Mbps per device. With multiple users all working and accessing entertainment in the home, your typical peak utilisation might only be around 40Mbps. Therefore, you should be looking not at the size of the pipe, but rather its performance and whether you have alternative options should it fail.”
Colyn believes homes and small office/home offices (SOHOs) can hedge their bets by opting for a lower capacity fibre line at a lower cost, and adding a second connection for redundancy.
Home users commonly resort to wireless as an alternative to fibre; however, Colyn notes that wireless options are generally poorly understood. “When they talk wireless, by implication a lot of people are thinking of mobile. They don’t differentiate between mobility and FWA.”
He explains: “You have mobility where you roam – for example, in your car. The mobile network operators also offer fixed LTE services, in which you have a router and it connects to a specific tower with no mobility. But the quality of this service is still subject to mobile network challenges, such as congestion, stolen batteries and load-shedding. The critical missing piece here is good, robust FWA.”
Not all FWA is equal, he notes. “Licensed FWA is enterprise grade and truly fibre equivalent, whereas unlicensed FWA is equivalent to a fibre GPON solution – it’s a best effort service subject to noise, packet loss and jitter.”
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