OTEL high-speed fibre customers can expect faster commissioning of their broadband services as the independent telco launches new retail fibre products on the back of partnership agreements with Dark Fibre Africa, Telkom and Neotel. OTEL's national agreements with the country's three biggest fibre providers gives it access to enterprise-scale long haul and in-metro fibre capacity.

"Access to Neotel's NeoCarrier services, for example, means lower costs to our clients and access to carrier grade fibre which adds greater value to our ISP and WISP customers," says OTEL CEO, Rad Jankovic.

"By adopting a blended approach of continuing to build our own fibre network while accessing the fast-expanding networks of leading players, OTEL can promise residential users, SMEs and corporates access to high speed retail fibre services in as little as three to four weeks," said Mr Jankovic.

By following this aggregation model and tapping into the growing 250 000 kilometre combined network of the country's main fibre players, OTEL FTTH at R599 monthly for a 10 Mbps service and OTEL Business Fibre at R1399 monthly for a 10 Mbps service solve several issues affecting fibre roll-out by independent operators.

These include delays being experienced in obtaining municipal approvals, limited backhaul availability and even topographical considerations affecting the speed of fibre deployment.

While speed has traditionally been the number one reason for businesses and consumers to go the fibre route; the technology is also environmentally-friendly, not prone to cable theft, experiences low latencies, and is impervious to the lightning strikes that characterise the highveld environment of South Africa's commercial capital.

OTEL Business Fibre (FTTB) exhibits very low contention ratios, or affordable 1:1 fibre solutions, depending on client requirements.

From a modest operation in 2008, OTEL is today a licensed business-to-business provider of VoIP & broadband Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions. Its nationwide dedicated network and cutting-edge technology positions OTEL as one of South Africa's leading telecoms providers with a specific focus on meeting the needs of SMMEs.

Its wholesale and retail fibre solutions are designed to increase profitability and reduce downtime and include hosted PBX, free email, server hosting, cloud services, as well as full-featured call centre solutions amongst other value-added voice and data services.