Photo by: Duane Daws
South Africa requires nearly 160 000 km of fibre to connect all of its citizens to broadband, but a gap of around half remained, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR’s) Kobus Roux said on Thursday.
Speaking at the CSIR’s fifth conference, in Pretoria, he said the council’s newly developed gap methodology has determined that between 61 754 km and 84 000 km of fibre would be needed to extend fibre from existing nodes to enable fibre broadband access to South Africa’s citizens.
The “kilo-people kilometre” methodology aimed to map out an estimation of how much work was needed to close South Africa’s broadband gap through fibre.
The organisation, which had worked with government to develop South Africa’s broadband plan, SA Connect, continued to map out the country’s broadband infrastructure to understand where the largest gaps were and what models could be used to narrow those gaps.