Here's what I leant:
Vuma
(as they prefer to call it) is a private company that
specialises in installing and operating 'FTTH' (Fibre To The
Home') optic fibre networks. It has been very active in
Johannesburg for few years, and has recently laid cables in
the Seapoint area and the City Bowl. It has a fairly good
industry reputation, and seems to know what its doing. The
owners have private + debt funding (R3bn from Standard Bank
I believe).
Vuma's
normal approach is lay optic fibre cables in ducts under the
ground, and extend this to individual homes on the request
of the home owner, or an ISP acting on the owner's behalf.
But in Observatory they intend to string cable between the
electricity poles. A different company called 'Fibrehoods'
came to an agreement with the City a few months back to do
this anywhere in Cape Town where there are suitable
electricity poles; Vuma recently bought Fibrehoods and so
have gained the rights to do this.
Vuma's
marketing approach is to try and get as many people as
possible to "commit" to their service in advance; the flyers
though our letterboxes are an effort to achieve this. They
push for a non-binding "commitment" as an indication that
sufficient members of a given community are potentially
interested in their service, and then expect to "convert" at
least 30% of the homes to fibre within a six month period.
If
you're not clear, then the advantages of using optic fibre
cables are that: (1) optic fibres have far more capacity
than Telkom copper cables (though few people can afford to
use the capacity they are capable of delivering). This is
what most of us think of as "speed" or Megabits per second
or Mbps or just "megs"; (2) optic fibre cable has much lower
levels of attenuation or signal strength loss; and (3)
exhibits lower latency or "time delay" in sending a bit of
digital data between you and where ever. Last (4) its not
subject to electromagnetic interference, or affected by the
weather. And it's pretty robust and stable -- it doesn't
need much in the way of maintenance unless it gets broken.
There
are a few issues with the Vuma model that people should be
aware of, if they are thinking about using the service.
These won't matter to most people, but are worth documenting
for the record.
First,
Vuma says that it is an 'open access' infrastructure
provider. This means that it owns the optic fibre network,
and lets ISPs use it to deliver an Internet service to you
at your home. Vuma charges the ISP for the use of its optic
fibre, and the ISP passes this charge on to you (the end
user) along with the cost of the data that you use up. But
its not really an infrastructure provider; actually it's an
access network provider, as it operates an active network
service over the fibre in a neighbourhood, and controls the
"speed" (actually capacity) of each connection. The ISP
simply provides the Internet bandwidth; the ISP has no
control over the access line speed or network performance.
So really you're becoming a customer of Vuma. If you have a
problem with your service, you will have to talk to your
ISP, who will then take it up with Vuma. Which puts you two
steps away from the actual network operator.
This
is not a bad model; just that there is more to it than Vuma
let on (at least to end users).
BTW,
Vuma will be "backhauling" the traffic from Observatory to
the ISPs using the City's Metro Area network between the
City's switching point at Salt River Fire Station and the
ISP peering point at Teraco in Newlands. Needless to say,
the City charges them to do this. The trenching that is
currently under way along the north side of LMR is to extend
the City's optic fibre network from Salt River through to
Mowbray (though this work is not directly related to the
Vuma marketing push). This cable will be used to connect up
the Observatory library and the Metro Police Training
Academy. I have a commitment from the project manager that
the contractor will re-instate the whole pavement properly;
this commitment has been made to Paddy Chapel as well.
Second,
stringing fibre on electricity poles is second-best to
burying it under the ground. It's much more likely to be
damaged, and customers will have a cable from their nearest
pole to the roof of their house. More clutter in the sky
above our streets. But on the other hand, we won't have the
disruption of the every pavement being dug up to install the
cable ducts (at least, not by Vuma. See below.)
Third,
and a consequence of point two: because Vuma is stringing
its cables from the electricity poles, it can't install big
enough cables to run a dedicated fibre pair to every house.
Underground cables have 72 or 144 fibres per cable, so each
house gets a dedicated pair. But aerial cables this big are
too heavy to hang from the poles. So Vuma is going to use a
different architecture, called a 'PON'. This stands for
'Passive Optical Network', which is a technology that uses
unpowered optic fibre splitters to share a single fibre pair
with multiple customers. It works OK, but it does put an
upper limit on the capacity available to each house.
Elsewhere, where Vuma has installed underground cables, they
have used a point-to-point dedicated pair architecture,
which is much better.
As
I say, these issues probably won't matter to most people,
but its good to be aware of them.
I
have heard that another optic fibre provider called
'Octotel' (
octotel.co.za), which is
associated with local ISP RSAWEB (
rsaweb.co.za), is looking
closely at Woodstock/Salt River/Observatory/Mowbray.
Full
disclosure: I am part owner of an ISP called Vanilla (
vanilla.co.za), which provides
point-to-point wireless Internet connections (as well as
providing service over City-owned, Octatel and LightSpeed
fibre where ever this is available). Vanilla has a good
customer base in Observatory.
I
have not received any payment or incentive from Vumatel to
promote or advertise its services.
I
hope this helps you all to understand what's going on, and
help individuals to make an informed decision.
If
anyone has any questions about optic fibre networks, I'll do
my best to answer them.
Cheers,
Mark
Neville
