DFA is nearing the completion of the first phase of its national network upgrade and future-proofing project and has begun installing new services and migrating existing customer services on to the upgraded infrastructure from July 2025.
The upgrade, which started in 2023 and has cost in excess of R800-million to date, comes at a time when South Africa is seeing a rapid evolution in technology adoption. This evolution is driving demand for faster, more robust and scalable fibre networks.
“While we’ve experienced challenges as a result of increased service interruptions and some infrastructure fatigue in recent years, this ongoing investment represents a fundamental redesign of our network architecture that will enable vastly improved connectivity in an increasingly complex digital world,” says Dewald Booysen, chief operations officer at Maziv, DFA’s parent company.
The speed of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, convergence of technologies, and a change in customer demands have necessitated an innovative pivot away from traditional network designs.
“The pace of change in how businesses use technology required not only more capacity and speed to market but a rethink of the network architecture itself,” Booysen explains.
Between 2022 and 2023, DFA experienced numerous network incidents, mainly affecting customers in parts of Gauteng. This region represents the highest density of infrastructure for DFA’s network, making it the logical starting point for the network upgrade strategy.
Better maintenance
The first major phase of investment was a R400-million Dry Underground Distribution Cabinet (DUDC) deployment in August 2023, to support higher fibre volumes linked to access services (both dark and managed), faster service delivery and improved resilience. Access services refers to the portion of the fibre network that resides within the customer’s premises.
It laid the groundwork for DFA’s national network modernisation and upgrade programme. DFA has also made simultaneous investments in digital automation, improved incident management and partner consolidation to increase operational efficiency, reduce fault to circuit ratios, and accelerate service delivery.
One of the key drives for the business was the implementation of greater incident management efficiency. Upgraded digital systems provide real-time reporting on incidents and fault maintenance, and greater accuracy in providing mean time to repair (MTTR) and service restoration commitments.
“To achieve this, we also kicked off a partner and contractor consolidation drive, improving accountability and consistency in customer experience,” Booysen says. “Together with automation at the Network Operations Centre (NOC), this helped us improve our response to daily network incidents.”
New architecture to meet demand
The project involves more than just increasing capacity to support volumes but enhancing the fundamental architecture through new design and network separation.
The new access network, supported by an upgrade of DFA’s core fibre network between nodes, creates better network separation needed to support the higher volumes for access services. It also revitalises the original fibre network supporting point-to-point dark services. This is key to maintain and improve the stability of existing services, while enabling faster delivery of new access services (both dark and managed services).
High-touch services, such as broadband services (due to volumes), require fast delivery and flexibility. Low-touch services require stable dark fibre links for long-term installations like mobile towers, and point-to-point services between data centres and customer sites.
“This has given us the ability to adapt and better manage both low touch and high touch environments,” Booysen says. “The new network architecture is easier to manage and allows us to deploy services more efficiently.”
Additionally, DFA has introduced a new fibre management system (FMS) to better track assets, improve record-keeping and streamline maintenance and improve service delivery.
A phased approach
DFA has structured the rollout in three phases:
- Phase 1: Focuses on Gauteng, with the migration of existing services from 1 July 2025 and continuing over the next 12 -24 months.
- Phase 2: Extends into the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal over the following year.
- Phase 3: Covers the rest of the national network over two to three years, ensuring consistent long-term performance as demand continues to grow.