A major debt finance deal promises to enable open access fibre provider MetroFibre Networx to bring more fibre connectivity to underserved markets in South Africa.

According to local press reports, major financial institution the Standard Bank Group says it has finalised a R5 billion (about US$295.5 million) debt finance package to support MetroFibre Networx’ ambitious fibre-optic data network rollout across South Africa.

The financing will be used to expand MetroFibre’s fibre connectivity into homes and businesses in underserved communities, contributing to increasing its reach by an additional 500,000 households across the country.

Metrofibre Networx, a carrier-class Ethernet (CE 3.0) infrastructure company that provides highly managed fibre optic broadband connectivity in South Africa, is one of a number of companies targeting less well-off customers.

Openserve, Frogfoot and Vumatel are among the other big names in a market where fibre network operators are cutting prices and increasing line speeds to win over customers.

News service ITWeb Africa points out that there is fierce competition driving the move into underserved markets such as townships. There also appear to be business opportunities.

On its website MetroFibre refers to its recently launched MetroConnect solution as a new “pre-paid pay-as-you-go service which provides a 20Mbps fibre connection into your home with the flexibility to top-up when you need to, for as long as you need it”.

It also describes the new service as one of the ways in which the company aims to “transcend the limitations that lock millions of South African homes out of access to fibre connectivity and leave them reliant on expensive and limited mobile connectivity”.

How long this competition can continue is unclear, though, judging from the MetroFibre Networx finance deal, there’s still a lot to play for in the market.

In a move I didn’t expect, but perhaps should have, a significant metro fiber M&A was announced this morning. BAI Communications has agreed to acquire the New York/New Jersey fiber operator ZenFi Networks. … [visit site to read more]

The FTTH space continues to see new entrants sprouting up in underserved areas. Late last week out in the Midwest the latest effort took shape with the launch of Omni Fiber by Oak Hill Capital. … [visit site to read more]

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Some data center projects, an FTTH provider creation, and the closing of a key acquisition: … [visit site to read more]

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At the Huawei Carrier Cloud Transformation Summit, Huawei’s Peng Song (pictured) – President, Carrier BG Marketing & Solution Sales – discussed the telecom industry’s cloud transformation and provided updates from Huawei in this area.

In recent years, cloud has become part of the digital transformation process across industries. It has become a key factor in reshaping the economic structure and the market landscape of every industry. Cloud transformation in the telecom industry has entered a critical stage, with both opportunities and challenges rapidly emerging.

Currently, most communication service providers have hybrid and multi-cloud environments in some form. It is estimated that 15% of carriers around the world will develop and fully implement a comprehensive cloud strategy by the end of 2023. This means that the cloud market is effectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars, so there will be fierce competition from the leading cloud service providers and other OTTs.

To stay competitive, carriers must therefore build an efficient and agile ICT infrastructure, enter new markets and thereby achieve new growth. In China’s telecom market, carriers are proactively building a « second growth curve » by using Data Technology, Information Technology and Communication Technology. Last year, they saw revenue growth of over 10% – far higher than the average growth rate of carriers across the world.

Peng said that carriers should take the approach of “CT plus Cloud”, instead of an approach of simply transforming CT by Cloud. He noted that the telecoms industry was uniquely positioned to benefit from connectivity dividends, as the value of telecom networks is increased by leveraging cloud transformation. To achieve these benefits, Peng highlighted the strengths that differentiate the telecom industry.

Peng explained that in terms of network value, carriers are able to expand network boundaries with the cloud, thereby improving network value in the B2B market and enlarging the scope of connectivity dividends. Since a carrier’s network is their core asset, they can use this to their advantage and conduct the cloud transformation in a synergistic way.

In China, Huawei provides network plus distributed cloud capabilities, enabling carriers to provide their enterprise customers with solutions for higher productivity of office and production activities. This not only increases their addressable market space by 25%, but also expands their influence in vertical industries.

In terms of digital innovation, carriers can build a cloud platform for digital business innovation that allows them to launch new services quickly and thereby explore the potential of connectivity dividends. Carriers can create collaborative cloud platforms that bridge telecom services and digital services to accelerate innovation, and acquire more customers from various market segments.

In Europe, Huawei helps carriers migrate their development and test environment as well as hundreds of services to Huawei Cloud platform. For example, one carrier shortened time-to-market by 75% for one digital service by using an agile development platform and telecom PaaS capabilities. This enables carriers to respond to customer requirements and competition in a more agile way.

With regards to telecom operations, carriers can expand the scale of connectivity dividends using the pre-integrated Huawei Cloud solution, which is designed to support sustainable growth within the telecoms industry. As far as telecom cloud transformation is concerned, it requires the cloud platform to adapt proactively to telecom service architecture. The distributed cloud architecture needs to meet the requirements in data security and management, while a rational timeline of cloud transformation needs to be defined to ensure getting the services on cloud in a safe and undisrupted manner.

In Asia, Huawei has deployed CEM applications on its distributed cloud. The public cloud offers agility and elasticity, and is used for less sensitive businesses, while more sensitive businesses are deployed on Huawei Cloud Stack locally to ensure business efficiency while affording customers control of their data and their business activities. Through the correlated analysis conducted by Huawei distributed data lake, between the OSS and BSS, the 5G package marketing success rate is improved by 180% – a solid example to support carriers’ business sustainable growth.

The goal of telecom cloud transformation is to provide quality services to customers. In order to realize this ultimate goal, it’s critically important to cooperate with strategic partners who deeply understand the telecom industry and know how to leverage and eventually maximize the strengths of telecom. Over the past few decades, Huawei has been providing high-quality services for customers in the telecom industry. By the end of 2021, Huawei had worked extensively with more than 120 carriers globally on cloud services, and will continue to make strategic investments in ICT and leverage its localized service capabilities worldwide to enable cloud transformation for its carrier customers. Huawei has determined to keep working with carriers to accelerate the cloud transformation journey, build new capabilities, and embrace new growth.