Kathy Gibson at SatCom, Sandton – Terrestrial and metro fibre will ultimately be the key solution to letting more consumers access bandwidth.
To accomplish this, there are a number of investment models that can be followed – all of them presenting both challenges and opportunities.
“In Ghana, for instance there is 15Tbps on the beach. We need to bring that inland and that’s a challenge,” says Eric Osiakwan, director of the West Africa Backhaul Company (WABco), speaking at today’s SatCom conference in Sandton.
If private companies invest in their own infrastructure, this inevitably results in a duplication of effort and costs to consumers remain high.
Osiakwan believes telecommunications companies need to start thinking about collaboration and sharing costs to overcome the infrastructure issues.
“In a place like Ghana, if someone came along and organised the market, you could have a robust network. If we could tone down the ego and work together it would be great.”
Open access could become an issue in these circumstances, but Osiakwan points out that operators need to put together inclusive agreements to separate operational and administrative issues.
In South Africa, municipalities and governments are rolling out fibre, arguing the private capital doesn’t reach the underserviced consumer, and this could be the answer to connectivity issues.
“One of the recommendations for fibre infrastructure is that it should be tied into other infrastructure,” says Osiakwan.
“The biggest cost is not the fibre itself, it’s the construction costs – up to 90% of the cost. It’s a good thing that municipalities have woken up to this and are putting the ducts in as they build other infrastructure. Private operators could then put in the fibre and light it.”
Despite this, fibre to the home and to the kerb is still not a reality in Africa.
Osiakwan stresses that this is not as easy as it sounds as it needs a certain level of population concentration to justify an investment.
However, African cities do tend to have a concentration of people, so there’s no reason why companies can’t consider fibre to the home in these cities.
Once providers move out of the urban areas, he adds, satellite plays a part in getting connectivity to the customer.
