Fibre network redraws South Africa’s digital map

South Africa’s digital future usually gets framed around slow Wi-Fi in hotels or patchy mobile coverage on cross-country drives. Yet beneath those everyday irritations sits one of the most extensive fibre networks on the continent.

It stretches across mountains, mining towns and national parks with a persistence that mirrors the country’s own complexity.

At the recent Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town, Openserve executive Dr Sunil Piyarlall suggested that this hidden system could be placed among the country’s most important economic assets.

“Openserve has in excess of 180,000 kilometres of fibre in South Africa. And maybe to put that into perspective, you can take that fibre and wrap it around the planet just over four times,” he says.

The reach is not theoretical.

“We cover every single municipality in the country. We cover all towns.”

The country’s digital map becomes a single networked structure rather than a scatter of isolated high-income pockets.

 “We believe that when South Africa connects, South Africa grows,” he says.

The principle extends across regions where connectivity influences the health of communities and the resilience of small businesses.

“Our intention is to try and connect as many communities as possible, to connect as many people as possible, to connect as many businesses as possible.”

The approach centres on uplift through access in areas where improved bandwidth carries “huge social impact” and “huge economic impact.” Fibre sits at the root of that vision.

“Fibre forms the very fabric, the very foundation for connectivity,” he says. “We look for high speed, low latency connectivity for smart cities.”

He offers practical examples of what such cities demand: “license plate recognition, facial recognition, the ability to control robots and take smart cities into smart homes, start making your home a smart home.”

That foundation also feeds into mobility. Piyarlall describes a recent personal experience that makes the future feel immediate.

“About two months ago, I had the opportunity to actually travel in an autonomous vehicle. It was an amazing experience. From a technology perspective, South Africa is ready.”

His description of built-in network intelligence shows how the system maintains stability.

“We have intelligence in our network equipment that monitors our fibre and it can pinpoint exactly where our fibre break is,” he says. He illustrates it with a vivid example: “If you have fibre on a railway bridge, it learns after a while that a train causes a certain amount of vibration, that cars cause a certain amount of vibration, but when someone is digging with a pick and shovel, that changes the frequencies that run on that fibre.”

Copper theft remains a major challenge.

“When people start digging for copper, they don’t know that there is a fibre cable or a copper cable, and they damage our cable. You damage a fibre cable, you take down thousands of customers at a time.”

Openserve’s network architecture is built to absorb such shocks.

“We have 100% resilience in our network. So we build a network that we have a failover route with 50% of that capacity spare to failover.”

His reflections on broadband speeds bring history into the present.

“When I started off in the late 90s, I had a 64 kilobit per second line at home, and I thought that was fantastic.”

But the shift in usage patterns reshapes the requirements for modern connectivity.

“With applications like TikTok and other social media applications, we’re starting to see people requiring more uplink capability, more capability to fast and very quickly upload content. Symmetrical connectivity is becoming a norm.”

His outlook for personal technology carries the same sense of imminent change.

“I almost foresee you not owning a smartphone in five years from now. You’re going to flick your hands and through your glasses, start phoning people.”

Devices on the body – rings, watches, glasses – form the emerging interface.

Education sits at the centre of his social perspective.

“What we’re driving very hard is school connectivity, because we believe that digital literacy is very important. In the next five years, over 70% of Africans are going to be under the age of 30. Those are the people we need to educate. We need to get onto technology to take us forward.”

And the same infrastructure opens access to essential services. “You can sit in the most remote part of Africa and you can consult with the best doctor in the world.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx, editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za, and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI – The African Edge”.