CENTURION, Gauteng – 17 February 2014 – Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) is in the process of acquiring South Africa-based Conduct, in a move to overcome the last mile barrier and give enterprises across South Africa easy access to fibre connectivity.
Conduct is a last mile fibre solutions provider offering an open access network to service providers, so allowing them to deliver high speed voice, video and data solutions. The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of March, pending the necessary approvals.
Reshaad Sha, Chief Strategy Officer at DFA, notes: “The Conduct acquisition gives us an overnight presence as a last mile provider and, importantly, puts into motion our strategy to connect as many customers to our fibre network as possible in a cost effective way.”
Sha notes that DFA has identified a largely unmet need in the market for cost-effective fibre connectivity to enterprise customers. The cost of building out the last mile from an existing network into the building has been a barrier to entry to fibre connectivity for many enterprises, he says.
“Our customers, being Internet Service Providers and telecoms operators, therefore require an underlying solution that accelerates business connectivity more economically,” he says. “DFA has focused its efforts on building a product set to lower or remove, this barrier to entry,” says Sha.
Johan Pretorius, CEO at Conduct, notes: “Conduct’s last-mile network enables enterprises to get access to fibre very rapidly. Combining this last mile infrastructure with DFA’s metro network provides ISPs instant access to new customers whilst businesses benefit from fibre. Suddenly there are fast, reliable, competitive services at their fingertips.”
DFA expects its last mile strategy to be significantly enhanced with the acquisition of Conduct, allowing it to further speed up the delivery of last mile fibre connectivity to its customers while maintaining the successful recipe that Conduct has developed over the last two years. DFA, through its ISP partner network, aims to connect up to 10,000 business customers to its fibre network by March 2015.
DFA will make all the capital investments required to build out this last mile fibre network where it currently has a metro network presence across South Africa.
DFA is the premier wholesale, open-access fibre-infrastructure and -connectivity provider in South Africa. We finance, build, install, manage, and maintain a world-class fibre network to transmit metro and long-haul telecommunications traffic. We started rolling out our fibre network in 2007, and to date, we have deployed over 13,000 km of ducting infrastructure in major metros, secondary cities, and smaller towns. Our network runs with an industry-leading uptime of 99.98%. We lease our secure transmission and backbone fibre infrastructure and provide associated connectivity services to telecommunications operators, Internet service providers, media conglomerates, tertiary education institutions, municipalities, government organizations, and other businesses, large and small, on equal terms. DFA is a Level 3 B-BBEE Contributor on the ICT Sector Codes.
Press contacts
Tribeca PR for DFA
dfa@tribecapr.co.za