No Business Case for Fibre in Africa, Says Braun

Harald Braun, president, Harris Stratex Networks, has said that there is no strong business case for fibre in Africa considering the cost of laying such infrastructure.
At the unveiling of the company’s service centre and future network operating centre (NOC) in Lagos recently, he said that the business case for fibre, from the industry’s experience is just not viable. “In a mobile region like Africa, microwave is a good way of doing business and bridging long distances. This is what we think is the best business case for company’s capex. In some cases though, you could lay fibre from your central office to the tower and then go wireless from there.”
“In Africa, there is no much fibre optic cable in the ground. When somebody decides to go from the central office to the base station with a fibre link, then we are not in business because there would not be need for wireless infrastructure. But I cannot see anyone doing that because it is too expensive. And then you have the geography here that would hamper the viability of that business case,” Braun argued.
“Nigeria is the best country in Africa for our business. Therefore, we are going to invest more here. We have put up service and training centres; and are planning for a network operating centre (NOC) in the future. We have expansion plans in Africa and have not really tapped into the potential here,” he said, adding: “Our strongest countries here are Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone.”
He stated that his company was capable of doing business in the continent, and has the right product portfolio; being a truly mobile company which bulk of its business is on microwave.
The Harris Stratex boss said Nigeria needed to figure out her frequency situation. “There are certain frequencies available right now. We can provide end-to-end WiMAX solutions for companies. Once the frequencies are allocated and people can reliably work out their strategies on these frequencies, we would be a service provider. It is the only 4G offering available in the world and we are deploying it in India and the U.S.”