By Jennigay Coetzer – Business Day, 9 June, 2009

Regulators and policy-makers throughout the world are encouraging infrastructure sharing, and this has given rise to infrastructure providers that dig trenches in the ground, lay down ducting and fibre cabling and rent it to many operators and service providers at a price worked out per kilometre.
“Alternatively, we can provide raw fibre to operators and install and maintain it,” says Richard Came, CEO of Dark Fibre Africa.
Having opted to rent or purchase the raw fibre, transmitting equipment needs to be installed to activate it, or light it up.
Fibre optics use a series of light signals to transmit data and equipment is needed to activate this.
Came says the company has laid 750 kilometres of ducting in central Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and Pretoria and its service includes access security, fibre maintenance, monitoring and management.
He says there is more potential than ever for this type of service in SA since the recent issuing of licenses to service providers that allow them to set up their own infrastructure.
In overseas markets like Europe it is common practice for operators share infrastructure.
To illustrate why this is happening, no single telecommunications operator can cover the whole of Europe, so they swap capacity with each other or use a dark fibre operator, says Came.
He says 80% of the cost of building a fibre network is in digging the trenches.
“We can accommodate 100 operators or more in one trench and they can be up and running and billing customers right away.”
Another significant happening in the local broadband market is an international connectivity hub set up by, Teraco Data Environments.
Local operators and service providers and international carriers can place their equipment in the hub and interconnect and buy services from each other, says MD Lex van Wyk.
“Smaller service providers will also be able to link into the hub and choose which operators, carriers and service providers they connect to locally and internationally.”
Managed services companies will also be encouraged to link into the hub, for example those providing desktop support, remote backup services and network monitoring.
With multiple operators and service providers connected to the hub, customers will be able to switch from one service to another within 24 hours of the paperwork being completed, says van Wyk.
The hub is based on a model that is being used successfully in overseas markets by companies such as Telehouse and Telecity in Europe and Equinix, the biggest international hub of its type in the US.
Participants each rent a dedicated secure space and rental includes access security to the building and the hub, surveillance, fire suppression, environmental monitoring and power.
The company has built its first hub in Cape Town and is opening another in Johannesburg towards the end of the year.
Teraco has been allocated seven megawatts of power by Eskom, which is enough to support 3,500 square metres of space filled with equipment, with spare capacity for expansion.
“Telkom, Vodacom, Neotel, Fastnet and Web Africa are already linked into the hub and we have had a lot of other local and international interest,” says van Wyk.