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.