The plethora or fibre – and fibre service providers – flooding urban areas, offering Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and Fibre-to-the-business(FTTB) services has rapidly changed the way Internet services are delivered to customers. Thanks to the open access nature of most fibre networks, the connectivity market has expanded exponentially over a relatively short period of time. This has paved the way for more competition, better pricing models, less lock-in contracts and the delivery of a greater number of Internet enabled services than ever before.

For businesses, being connected is no longer a want – it’s a need. Businesses cannot operate without speedy and stable connectivity. Many companies have their own interbranch networks and rely upon connectivity to communicate and exchange information, not only amongst themselves, but also with their customers. Telephony, video streaming, IP cameras and centralised systems all need stable and fast connectivity in order to function efficiently and effectively.

Mobile networks still offer great convenience, particularly for people who work on the go and don’t rely on a fixed network. However, mobile networks in urban areas are often congested, with too many users clogging the network and reducing the overall quality and speed of the connectivity. As there are not enough frequencies available in South Africa to accommodate the vast number of users, mobile data networks are often over accessed, which reduces them to best effort services.

Fibre offers much lower latencies and faster speeds than either ADSL or mobile networks. This is great for home users, but critical for businesses. If an organisation wants to run real-time applications such as IP telephony networks or video conferencing, quality of service (QoS) is of utmost importance. Businesses running private cloud services such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems need a reliable and fast network to do so.

Fibre provides the speeds – upload and download – and stability that ADSL and mobile networks are not able to. And all of the choice.

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