Made in China

Interesting, for a few days now I have seen Chinese nationals working on the Vumatel Fibre backbone. Don’t get me wrong, I want the fibre but why the Chinese? It looks like China Comservice, a subsidiary of the China Telecommunications Corporation, has been sub-contracted by Vumatel to install the fibre optics. This begs the question; don’t we have our own fibre optic installers?

On the way home back from an appointment in Pretoria I saw these 2 Chinese nationals connecting the dark fibre near my home. Okay say we don’t have enough local installers or say we can’t pay them the same we pay the Chinese. I would have imagined at least that we would have some sort of "transfer of knowledge" training on the ground but I didn’t see any local installers with a Chinese educator training our locals. What are we going to do in the future, make a long distance service call to China or is there something I am not seeing.

Another question; are we using "Fong Kong" products or Chinese top of the range products?

Note to some of my readers who are not local, the township slang words "Fong Kong" means something cheap or a copy made in China which will inevitably break sooner than later. I know it might be demeaning to some of my Chinese friends, and I do apologise up front. But take vehicles for example, the Japanese after the war made cars that were very unreliable, terrible in fact and after a few decades they became leaders in vehicle manufacturing with some of the best cars in the world. After a while Korea started making vehicles and it took them half the time to go from rubbish to awesome cars.

Now it is the Chinese turn and I believe their cars which are not so good will be up there with the best within even half time it took Korea. It's a learning curve that is getting shorter and shorter. Look at the cellular industry with majority of cellphone manufacturing now made in China.

Now are these made in China fibre optic equipment installed by the Chinese up there with the best or do we say "Fong Kong" for now as the price was just right?