Fibre infrastructure company DFA is nearing the completion of the first phase of its national network upgrade and future-proofing project, which started in 2023 and has cost more than R800-million to date.

Since July, the group has been installing new services and migrating existing customer services onto the upgraded infrastructure.

“While we have experienced challenges as a result of increased service interruptions and some infrastructure fatigue in recent years, this ongoing investment represents a fundamental redesign of our network architecture that will enable vastly improved connectivity in an increasingly complex digital world,” said DFA parent company Maziv chief operations officer Dewald Booysen.

Between 2022 and 2023, DFA experienced numerous network incidents, mainly affecting customers in parts of Gauteng, where the company started a network upgrade strategy as the province represented the highest density of infrastructure for DFA’s network.

DFA has structured the rollout in three phases, with Phase 1 focusing on Gauteng, with the migration of existing services continuing over the next 12 to 24 months.

Phase 2 extends into the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal over the following year, while Phase 3 will cover the rest of the national network over two to three years, ensuring consistent long-term performance as demand continues to grow.

“The speed of AI adoption, convergence of technologies and a change in customer demands have necessitated an innovative pivot away from traditional network designs,” said Booysen, noting that the pace of change in how businesses use technology required not only more capacity and speed to market but a rethink of the network architecture itself.

The first major phase of investment was a R400-million Dry Underground Distribution Cabinet deployment, in August 2023, to support higher fibre volumes linked to access services – both dark and managed – faster service delivery and improved resilience.

This laid the groundwork for DFA’s national network modernisation and upgrade programme.

DFA has also made simultaneous investments in digital automation, improved incident management and partner consolidation to increase operational efficiency, reduce fault to circuit ratios and accelerate service delivery.

One of the key drives for the business was the implementation of greater incident management efficiency, with upgraded digital systems providing real-time reporting on incidents and fault maintenance, and greater accuracy in providing mean time to repair and service restoration commitments.

“To achieve this, we also kicked off a partner and contractor consolidation drive, improving accountability and consistency in customer experience. Together with automation at the Network Operations Centre, this helped us improve our response to daily network incidents,” Booysen continued.

In addition to increasing capacity to support volumes, the project is enhancing the fundamental architecture through new design and network separation.

The new access network, supported by an upgrade of DFA’s core fibre network between nodes, creates better network separation needed to support the higher volumes for access services. It also revitalises the original fibre network supporting point-to-point dark services.

This is key to maintain and improve the stability of existing services, while enabling faster delivery of new access services.

High-touch services, such as broadband services, require fast delivery and flexibility, while low-touch services require stable dark fibre links for long-term installations like mobile towers and point-to-point services between data centres and customer sites.

“This has given us the ability to adapt and better manage both low touch and high touch environments. The new network architecture is easier to manage and allows us to deploy services more efficiently.”

Further, DFA introduced a new fibre management system to better track assets, improve record-keeping and streamline maintenance and improve service delivery.

“This is not just an upgrade in network capacity, it is about transforming how the network operates so we can deliver faster, more robust services to keep pace with South Africa’s digital future,” Booysen concluded.