To Dig or not to dig
As the old saying/idiom goes: “Don’t dig your own grave”, our Evotel aerial Fibre to the Home (FTTH) Network solutions will help you to avoid making a mistake that may cause you to have problems in the future. In the case of fibre network installations an over-ground installation, in our view, is more valuable than traditional trenched or underground solutions, especially in regional towns where municipal services capacity may already be under severe pressure in delivery.
Digging a trench where water, sewage and electricity lines are already laid to install fibre internet cabling may result in issues. Trenched solutions can cause major disruptions to the existing municipal infrastructure and services that, as you might have experienced before, can sometimes take days to repair leaving you without a connection as these take longer to repair.
The risk of hitting municipal services is 1/100 or 1% of a conventional trenching solution. An average of two to seven breaks per day is common when a trenched solution is put in and places unnecessary stresses on already crippled municipalities to deliver these basic services to repair.
Because our network is above ground, there is no need for us to dig a trench, six-feet under, to repair any cables if there is a break. Apart from that, we also don’t require any emergency wayleaves and experience delays in waiting for various permissions to fix the network, subsequently lessening the time of repairs.
From a maintenance perspective, the benefit of our above-ground solution is to drastically ease and shorten maintenance work and repairs to the network infrastructure.
Added to this is the further benefit of the Evotel solution to also allow for a speedy rollout of the initial infrastructure deployment. Our overhead installation, using existing municipal infrastructure, is much quicker than trenched solutions and drastically increases the rollout reach and allows for an extensive blanket roll-out, getting critical connectivity to more people, faster.
It is important to note that an aerial or above-ground solution is equal in terms of modern technology because we use the same fibre optics as is used in trenched solutions that people see in large cities.
We concede that an over-ground solution is not as pretty as a trenched solution, in terms of the hiding of cables. We believe that the benefits of an aerial solution far outweigh the prettiness of a trenched solution, which we are confident is much more important than aesthetics. Trenching solutions also compromises the integral structure of the road system and often these trenches collapse during the high rain seasons, causing further disruptions to services.
We do, however, understand that some people like their surroundings to be pleasing so we try to always minimise the visual aspect of our installations by placing additional poles near trees to blend in. We use existing municipal infrastructure, approved by the municipality, giving us access to streetlights and electricity poles to install the fibre network. As a result, we require only a few supplementary poles to be installed on the one side of the road – one pole for every four homes we connect – with a maximum trench of 1m compared to the 100m trenches for conventional trenching solutions. However, our ultimate goal is to provide a fibre network that is fast and reliable to people, so whilst we advocate and mainly install aerial infrastructures, because we believe in its increased benefits, it doesn’t preclude us from doing trenched installations.
We advise to not dig your own grave when considering an FTTH network and opt for ploughing into the dirt to lay a cable but choose an over-ground aerial solution instead.
