MTN to start high-speed fibre pilot next month

Published Apr 25, 2014

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Johannesburg - Residents of gated communities and high-rise buildings are set to become the first consumers of the high-speed internet service that MTN South Africa will launch commercially on June 1.

Yesterday, the company said the high-speed fibre to the home offering was capable of transferring data packets at a speed of 100 megabits per second (Mbps).

The first commercial pilot will be launched at Monaghan Farm, a gated estate north of Lanseria Airport in Johannesburg, in mid-May. MTN said it had signed up 60 percent of the residents.

The company is aggressively rolling out the network, which it has been testing since last year, to business parks, premium gated communities, boom-controlled suburbs and high-rise buildings where it has been awarded contracts.

Eben Albertyn, the chief technology officer, said the company had secured a substantial contract in George.

“Our regional teams in all major metros are continually reviewing new applications,” she said, adding that as the high-speed network and national long distance fibre network, which MTN is building with Neotel and Vodacom, was further rolled out to smaller towns, the service footprint would be extended.

Fibre to the home is an opportunity for the operator to provide services that include video on demand, music streaming, security and surveillance and a connected home, among other services.

MTN is among several companies that are providing high-speed internet to the home. Consumers worldwide have evolved in their consumption of bandwidth as they upload and download multimedia files, play games online and view multiple high definition television channels.

In South Africa, Vodacom, Telkom and Neotel have also been running trials. Several estates in the country already had fibre to the home, an analyst said, but MTN’s announcement was the first time a top-tier player had made a strong statement.

The commercial roll-out of 100Mbps lines ranked South Africa among international providers but it is not state of the art. In the UK, Virgin Media offers broadband speeds up to 1 000Mbps.

Verizon FiOS in the US offered download speeds of up to 500Mbps with upload speeds of 100Mbps, Tim Parle, a senior consultant at local research firm BMI-TechKnowledge, said.

“This will be a slow start and we are still seeing the early adopters on the typical S-curve for product uptake.”

He added that opportunities for service providers “lie in owning the customer and bundling voice, data, video and video on demand services on top of this. These will come at a premium.”

He added that the cost of accessing the network could be between R1 500 and R2 000 monthly, which would compete with 10Mbps uncapped or large capped services on ADSL, a fixed-line technology.

MTN said in the laboratory it had produced speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second.

Albertyn said: “By pioneering the technology in South Africa (and indeed Africa, for the current set of speeds on offer), we are sealing our position as the provider of choice.”

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