Estate Living Magazine Smart Moves - Issue 38 February 2019 | Page 50

L i v E S M A R T FIBRE WEB Unless you have been living in a cupboard for the last few years, you know that fibre is the next big thing. It’s super-fast, it’s stable, and it will rock your world. But, as with many new and exciting things, we’re so psyched about the possibilities and so caught up in the hype, we haven’t really sat down to figure out how all the components fit together. And we need to do this because, while fibre is fast, any network is only as fast as its slowest link. So, yes, we’re all so excited about ‘getting fibre’ that we don’t even mind the disruption when someone comes along to dig up the road outside our houses, and our driveways become somewhat shaky wooden bridges for a few weeks. Because, once they’ve filled in the trench, pulled up the planks and replaced the driveway, we will all live happily ever after in super-fast-data-land. It’s not quite that simple As with many new technologies, we tend to get excited about the new part, forgetting that it is – in many ways – merely a development of an older one. Same with fibre. While the actual cable is new and exciting, it’s really just a network, and how the network is structured can be more important than what it’s made of. So we need to take into consideration how our local networks are connected to the larger networks – on a number of scales. Who owns the cable networks? One of the advantages (and one of the disadvantages) of fibre connectivity is that it has further taken the ownership of communications networks out of the hands of governments and state-owned enterprises, and put it into the hands of private corporations (some of which are partly owned by governments and state-owned enterprises, but don’t go there – that way lies madness). But probably the most important thing to know is that ‘ownership’ is very, very complex. The undersea cables are owned by large corporations, governments, parastatals and/or a combination thereof. And, remember, when we discuss a cable, e.g. Seacom or SAFE, we are describing a route that is owned by a specific entity. But that route is not in isolation, so it will connect to another route that may or may not be owned by the same entity, or by a consortium of which some of the members are the same. What this is, really, is a multi-layered, multi-level network owned by various for-profit entities, each one of which wants your business. So they employ smart salespeople and savvy PR folk.