Photo by: Bloomberg
Telecommunications giant Vodacom has taken another step towards expanding its fixed-lined capabilities as it moved to build a fibre-to-the-home network.
South Africa’s largest mobile operator appointed communication solution provider Alcatel-Lucent to deploy a gigabit passive optical networking-based converged network that would enable the offerings of mobile, voice, video and data services to 150 000 homes and 100 000 businesses within the next three years.
Vodacom aimed to roll out the new converged network to all major centres in South Africa, including Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban.
This emerged as Vodacom worked to acquire converged communications network operator Neotel, which would enable the mobile operator access to over 15 000 km of fibre-optic cable nationwide.
Vodacom believed that the synergies of the parties would enable the provision of a wider range of business services and much-needed consumer services, such as fibre-to-the-business and fibre-to-the-home – a space in which Vodacom currently only had an estimated 2% market share, despite attempts to build a fixed-line business.