Background

Frogfoot is a licensed open-access fiber network provider in South Africa with 15 years’ experience in the telecoms industry. Frogfoot is widely acknowledged for its technical excellence and plays a pivotal role in the growth of fiber to the business and home in South Africa. The network provider is well positioned to build and maintain fiber networks that will enable service providers to acquire their own fiber backbones on a shared network.

Having operated fiber networks throughout South Africa for years, Frogfoot understands the challenges of deploying and managing large fiber networks. Frogfoot currently has an extensive fiber footprint, with more than 50,000 buildings already linked to its network and a coverage area spanning more than 18,000 sqkm (about 6,950 sqmiles) in five regions.

PPC Broadband is the pioneer and market leader for high-quality, pushable and spliceless FTTH solutions for Africa, designed to dramatically reduce installation times while increasing the quality and network reliability.

Mustek SA has the largest pre-termination facility on the continent of Africa with the ability to produce in excess of 12,000 FTTH leads per day. Each lead is tailored specifically to Frogfoot specifications and factory polished before being individually tested and given a unique serial number for full traceability.

Scenario

“Frogfoot embarked on an aggressive FTTH expansion program to deploy FTTH to 30,000 homes during 2017. We will have 135,000 passed or under construction by the end of 2018.” says Rikus Stander, Head of Planning at Frogfoot. “There is a land grab going on in South Africa at the moment and not only do we need to give coverage, we need to give quality, reliability and longevity to our network so the customer can pick and choose the right service for them.”

“Frogfoot brings four fibers to each home once they branch out from the backbone fiber, giving the end customer total freedom to select from up to 50 ISP’s depending on the level of service they require,” says Simon Roberts, PPC Sales Director for Africa. “With such aggressive deployment plans and a high requirement for quality and ease of deployment, it was hugely important that we understood what Frogfoot was trying to achieve and gave them the tools to do it right first time.”

Tailored Frogfoot Terminated, Pushable FTTH Solution

PPC Broadband pioneered and tailored Miniflex® fiber optic cable for not only the harsh challenges of the African environment, but for the gap that existed as the installation teams migrated from a copper network to a fiber optic network.

“PPC designed the Miniflex to withstand impact crush resistance of more than 350kg per square foot,” Daniel Jenkins,  Director of Research and Development at PPC Broadband, said.