Vodacom on Monday announced that Alcatel-Lucent will provide the equipment needed for its high-speed fibre network.
The South African operator plans to deploy gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) infrastructure in major city centres with the aim of supporting bandwidth-hungry services for residential and business customers.
"We first began talking with Alcatel-Lucent about expanding Vodacom’s business into the fixed access market five years ago," said Andries Delport, CTO of Vodacom, in a statement. "Over time, the Alcatel-Lucent team was able to show that it was the right move for us and that their solution was the best for our needs."
Vodacom’s network will initially cover Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. It aims to reach 150,000 homes and 100,000 businesses within the next three years.
"This effort represents a significant and bold move by Vodacom into the fixed network space and allows them to take advantage of new, revenue-generating business models," said Willem Hendrickx, president of Alcatel-Lucent EMEA.
The contract will see Vodacom roll out Alcatel-Lucent’s end-to-end GPON solution, as well as its customer experience, and services access management platforms. The deal also includes OSS, and deployment and managed services.
"We are excited that our technology, expertise and knowledge are helping to take Voda com to the next level of converged communications," said Hendrickx.
