TelOne Hopes Fibre Backbone Link Will Counter Vandalism; The Company Recorded 393 Vandalism Cases Last Year

Yesterday the President finally commissioned TelOne’s new Fibre Backbone Link and interestingly, TelOne feels that this new link will go a long way in reducing incidents of vandalism that have led to major service disruptions for the telecommunications company.

The vandalism problem…

Last year there were a number of high profile vandalism incidents that affected TelOne’s service delivery, with one such incident affecting 1800 users back in May. The company went on to start a rewards program for people to be reporting vandals, shortly before revealing that they had lost amounts in the region of $3 million due to vandalism. This seems to be a huge problem for TelOne and some comments on our previous stories regarding these issues seem to suggests that this is partly TelOne’s fault because their installations are on the reckless side but that’s a story for another day.

Why will the new Fibre Link address this?

The fibre link is supposed to bring an end to all this but why? TelOne touched on this briefly in the media briefing they sent out yesterday:

TelOne has been a victim of network vandalism and copper cable theft with 393 cases recorded in 2018 compared to 106 cases in 2017 and with a monthly revenue loss of at least $2,2 million. The commissioning of this link is advantageous to our network as the fibre material does not have a commercial value thus making our network less prone to vandalism.

This statement goes to greater lengths explaining just how big of a problem TelOne had on their hands. Vandalism cases more than doubled year on year but because fibre material doesn’t have other use cases like the copper cables of old they believe that the problem will be less widespread. The disclosed figure of $2.2 million/month does seem to suggest that TelOne went on to lose much more than $3 million they disclosed previously and that’s a big problem.

The shift to fibre will probably be the anecdote to TelOne’s vandalism struggles as we never hear vandalism making headlines at their competitor ZOL.

TelOne

TelOne is one of the several Telecoms companies operating in the Zimbabwean telecommunications and technology industry. Its main core business revolves around voice, data and internet products and services. “TelOne owns a wide range of telecommunications equipment, varying from various exchanges located in strategic areas,… Read More About TelOne