Cape Town to connect fibre to all CBD buildings

The City of Cape Town is rolling out fibre broadband access to all buildings in the central business district (CBD) as part of its investment into a municipal broadband network project.

The city announced on Tuesday that it had connected an additional 49 private buildings to high-speed fibre broadband. This is in addition to 290 government buildings already connected to high-speed fibre broadband in the city.

“It is part of the metro-wide R1.7-billion roll-out of the municipal broadband network," Carola Koblitz, communications manager for the Central City Improvement District (CCID) told Fin24 about the project.

"We’ve not been given the costs to the city of each individual building roll-out,” Koblitz told Fin24.

The city, meanwhile, plans to install so-called “last mile” infrastructure to every building in the Cape Town on an open access network, which means that individuals can choose the internet service provider of their choice.

Furthermore, multiple service providers can offer high-speed Internet access of 1 Gb/s (gigabit per second) on the network.

“In terms of service providers within buildings, one of the major advantages is that multiple commercial operators will be able to provide services. There is no ‘one’ service provider,” said Koblitz.

By 2012, the city aims to connect 950 government and 2 500 private buildings across the metro.

In terms of the procedure, service providers have to request a fibre lease between the city’s switching centre and the building. The cost of the lease will be covered under the agreement between the service provider and the consumer.