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?

Cheap and Nasty

It is the last day of July and finally the timber poles are being erected in my street for the fibre rollout in Helderkruin, Roodekrans, and Wilro Park suburbs of Roodepoort. Just 1 month to go to the Go-Live date, and I am excited as a pig in Philistine but there is already such a who ah about it in the social media, that I feel I should give my 2 cents worth.

So as the lines are being drawn into the social sand, I feel it is a little too late to change the current course and do I want to... nah. We have be watching the fibre roll outs in other suburbs with a enviousness that could amount me moving to greener connected areas. A few months back this all changed as on the 14 June the company Vumatel and the local community met to discuss the matter of rolling out fibre here. This is what I know but please correct me if I am wrong. There are a few companies rolling out fibre into the neighbourhoods. Vuma one of the leading companies was bought out by Fibrehoods and formed Vumatel.

Like the rest of the fibre backbone companies the race was on, Vumatel operating under the profit principle are looking for areas of higher returns to roll out the fibre first, hence we are way down the list as there are more single stand dwellings compared to multi units such as town houses and clusters in Roodekrans, plus to make things worse it is very rocky here especially where I live.

Anyway, at the June meeting, Vumatel said that they only considered this area viable if they go aerial. This means that they will with the blessing of the City of Joburg, use the existing street light poles to run fibre aerially to each home and put where there is no street light poles these treated timber poles. Now this is where someone stood up and said that they have seen Vumatel’s aerial installations in Constantia Kloof and to them the aerial route is "cheap and nasty" and I quote verbatim. Cheap and nasty, wow that was rather harsh but I understand as in our area only one side of the road has street lights and the other side, well they would need the timber poles.

This small vocal group argued that digging trenches and lying the fibre underground was a better solution as aerial destroyed the beauty of the suburbs. Telkom laid trenching why couldn’t Vunmatel? But they are forgetting that Telkom was forced to trench as copper cable theft was rife and they were loosing money. In fact Telkom too is now installing aerial in Kloofendal. The nature of fibre optics does not have any monetary valve for thieves hence aerial is the cheaper, cost effective, and faster way.

Playing the Devil’s Advocate here, I would like to state for the other side of the coin, have you seen Vumatel’s trenching solution in Randpark Ridge? It took way too long and while digging trenches the sub-contractors cut power and water lines left right and centre.

Holding us by the short and curlies, Vumatel stated at the June meeting that they have only considered aerial in this area, trenching to them is a no go and they would look somewhere else more profitable. After a bit of back and forth, the final consensus was that fibre is needed and we cannot wait for another few years before another company comes along to offer us a trench solution. So yay we were given a Go-Live date of end of August, I can't wait.

For me trenching would be ideal but at what cost and when. So roll on the cheap and nasty please, we can argue about the semantics later.