One of the most notable effects of the Covid-19 pandemic was felt in the demand for connectivity as more people shifted to working from home.
For the team at Safaricom that handles Fibre To The Home (FTTH) and Fiber To The Business (FTTB), the sudden restrictions on movement at the time and the need for social distancing resulted in a higher demand for these services.
This resulted in accelerated deployment of fibre (the supply side) to support the new paradigm (the demand side). The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies, with connectivity, whether wired (fibre) or wireless (4G/5G) being key.
The Home service that initially began with a pilot in 2014 at Nyayo Estate in Embakasi and later Jacaranda Gardens on Kamiti Road, continues to grow as customers get used to the pleasures of having a good connection to the Internet at home and for their business needs.
A fibre connection essentially links a home or business to one of the six fibre optic cables linking Kenya to the rest of the world via a cable landing station at Nyali in Mombasa.
“How you visualize fibre is actually as a physical connection between your home/business and our Point of Presence (PoP) or central office (CO),” says Nyagitari Bosire, a Tribe Technical Lead for Fixed Data in charge of delivering the connectivity products.
The planning and network design phases of bringing fibre to a home or business involve prospecting and surveying an area and then considering how many homes or businesses are to be covered. These numbers are usually presented as homes or businesses passed upon completion of rollout.
Opportunities normally present the team at Safaricom with two scenarios: deployment for single-tenant dwelling units (SDU) or multi-tenant dwelling units (MDU), essentially single-family units or apartment blocks. Several commercial considerations are also made concerning the target area to create a sustainable business.
In situations where homes or office blocks are built much later after Safaricom has rolled out its network, the team takes two considerations. If the installed feeder cable has capacity out of provisions that were made during the prospecting, survey and design phase, it is possible for the connection of the additional homes or business. Should that not be the case, they then execute mechanisms to provide additional capacity via expansion programs purposely designed on a case-by-case basis.
After planning, the construction phase is very visible as it entails excavations (diggings) for burying the fibre optic feeder cable in underground deployment. Underground fibre optic cables are used for fibre cable installation beneath the earth’s surface at a specified depth. Normally, a duct (pipe) is buried, and fibre is installed inside the pipe. For overhead deployment, the feeder cable is strung on power poles for rapid deployment.
The size in the number of cores, which are individual strands of fibre in the feeder cable, is determined by the number of homes or businesses to be connected, taking into consideration split ratios. Remember the homes or businesses passed? That number is critical for the dimensioning of the network.
Once the feeder cable is laid or strung overhead, for your home or business to access Internet services via fibre, the fibre cable will run from your home or business premise to the central office (PoP). This is through a succession of intermediate passive elements.
A quick guide-through is necessary.
The feeder cable connects several Fibre Distribution Terminals (FDTs), which in turn connect to other Fibre Access Terminal Boxes (FATs), which connect to the device now placed within your home/business through an access terminal box (ATB). The Optical Network Terminal (ONT), which is also your gateway router, allows access to the Internet by either a physical cable or wirelessly through WiFi to the home or business devices (phones, TVs, set-top-boxes, laptops, game stations, etc).
To access Internet services, the OLT connects upstream back towards the provider’s network, where it carries traffic back and forth between the ONTs and the provider’s network.
To deliver Internet, the OLT connects to the core network through high-speed, high-capacity transmission links to the provider’s Internet gateways. The Internet gateways are then connected to the submarine cable systems through the cable landing stations. This is a location where a submarine line terminating equipment (SLTE) is installed and offers a location for domestic interconnection. An example of this is The East African Marine System (TEAMS) that connects Mombasa to Fujairah (UAE) and, from there, further connectivity to the world and into data centres where a host of content is hosted.
The 2022 Economic Survey by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics reported that in Nairobi City County, the number of residential houses completed increased from 11,802 in 2019 to 13,221 in 2020. This 12 per cent jump in a booming construction industry continues to create demand for fibre connectivity over and above the current backlog of unconnected homes.
“Some areas have grown very fast due to improved road infrastructure where initially fewer provisions had been made for connectivity. As mentioned earlier, we have teams optimizing and increasing capacities in the same areas. That is a trend we have seen. Due to finite budgets in each budgeting cycle, rollout is always a game of priorities,” said Nyagitari. “It’s usually a very tight balance on how you are going to apply your budget so that the business gets maximum returns.”
While the increased construction for both roads and buildings offers more opportunities for business, it has been a source of multiple service interruptions.
Several mitigation strategies are used to ensure minimal impact on customers whenever unforeseen fibre cuts happen. These include multiple redundancies built to fail over traffic seamlessly and the provision of dual capability ONTs that support automatic mobile data backup. Then, we have the more general solution where customers are offered mobile data bundles on their phones to keep them connected as the outage is under resolution.
There has been significant progress in the Internet space since the first submarine cable system landed in Kenya in 2009. This was The East Africa Marine System (TEAMs) connecting Mombasa to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, a distance close to 5,000 kilometres.
For Safaricom, connecting Base Transmission Stations (BTS), otherwise known as masts, with fibre optic cables enabled the rollout of 4G to more parts of the country.
Today, Safaricom has 14,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable and has passed 465,558 homes. According to the company’s annual report for 2023, Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH) has 195,741 customers, with 6,000 Fibre To The Building (FTTB) connections with 20,602 customers.
Fixed data has been designated as a new growth area for the company, and with the billions of devices coming online soon, the increase in demand must be met by building and upgrading the communication infrastructure to support it.
For digital transformation to be fully realized, says Nyagitari, high-quality access to communication networks and services should be made available at affordable prices to all people and businesses no matter where they are.
“We’ve not even started scratching the surface. I’m seeing an explosion in terms of the needs of the Internet,” said Nyagitari.
