The City of Cape Town, as part of its broadband infrastructure project, has completed a R125-million, 500-km optic fibre network project.

Consulting engineering company Gibb, which led the project management and undertook the civil engineering design and construction monitoring, said the project included laying a network of fibre optic cables across Cape Town with sufficient capacity to meet the city’s current and future needs.

The fibre optic network would ensure that the city has access to low-cost broadband services to support the delivery of municipal services and ensuring spare capacity is available to third-party network users.

This would reduce costs and contribute towards the economic growth of Cape Town, where about R70-million a year was spent on telecommunications costs for telephonic and data services at municipal offices.

City of Cape Town head of telecommunications Leon van Wyk said, in an earlier statement, that the main aims of the project were to improve the bandwidth available to the city at an affordable cost, while encouraging local economic development.

“The new cables would supply Cape Town buildings with over a thousand times more bandwidth, which is critical if new tools and systems are to be used to manage better and support the delivery of services. Without adequate bandwidth, a modern city just cannot function,” he said.

Gibb integrated infrastructure project director Sean Molloy said the company’s scope of work, which started in April 2009, was valued at some R7-million. This comprised the detailed design and construction monitoring of civil and switching centre infrastructure, as well as the management of the installation and testing of fibre cable and ensuring that the external contractor’s activities were aligned with the greater framework of the project, within the allocated timeframe.

The City of Cape Town will not be offering Internet service provider services, but will be leasing excess capacity on its own network. This means that selected organisations can apply to be connected to the city’s fibre network.
 

To subscribe to Engineering News's print magazine email subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za or buy now.