Acoustic noise in chips used to be a nuisance. Now scientists at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have developed a technique to put it to use in receivers of information in fibre-optic networks. It used to be known as the information superhighway, the fibre-optic infrastructure on which gigabytes and petabytes of data whizz around […]
Liquid Telecom, and Telecom Egypt, Egypt’s first integrated telecom operator, at the 2018 Annual Meetings of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that will enable Liquid Telecom to complete Africa’s Cape Town to Cairo terrestrial fibre network. Liquid Telecom will link its network from Sudan into Telecom Egypt’s network via […]
While mobile wireless and fixed wireless will always be in the connectivity picture, it will be fibre that that will see massive roll out in the next decade. One of the main reasons for this will be the deployment of 5G. Jannie van Zyl, head of innovation at Vodacom, speaking at the annual MyBroadband Fibre […]
The FTTH Council Africa has announced that it is in the process of changing its name to the FTTX Council Africa. Fibre to the X is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fibre. At the annual general meeting earlier this year it was unanimously decided by the members that the FTTH […]
The lack of spectrum is seriously hampering the mobile companies to expand their services and has a direct bearing on the underlying costs which is one of the main reasons why data rates in South Africa are high in comparison with other countries. These views were expressed by several senior executives of mobile companies speaking […]
Data centres are constantly moving toward faster speeds and tighter densities – operators want higher performance, but we don’t want to take up a lot of physical space to achieve it. In the past few years, 25 G and 100 G Ethernet have become mainstream in hyperscale data centres. As a result, the industry is […]
“It is today that we must create the world of the future”. This how Andile Ngcaba and I started our conversation. Earlier this year Ngcaba was elected as president of the FTTH Council Africa, which is focussed on the fibre industry and all stakeholders affected by the industry including national and local governments, private companies, […]
One of the most interesting innovations in optical fibre design in recent years has been to reduce the outer coating diameter from the established value of ~250 µm down to ~200 µm. The resulting drop in the fibre cross-sectional area of ~30% can be exploited by optical cable manufacturers to develop compact micro cables […]
The future of digital subscriber line technology such as ADSL and VDSL is something that many have been worried about, especially in view of the high performance of fibre optics and the increased focus on broadband wireless technologies. Will digital subscriber line (DSL) services disappear? Unlikely, for a long time to come. Here is […]
The plethora or fibre and fibre service providers flooding urban areas, offering fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and fibre-to-the-business (FTTB) services has rapidly changed the way internet services are delivered to customers. Thanks to the open access nature of most fibre networks, the connectivity market has expanded exponentially over a relatively short period of time. This has […]
