As the demand for high-speed connectivity continues to surge, the competition in the last-mile fibre market has intensified. Providers across South Africa are aggressively lowering prices to attract customers, but this price squeeze often comes at a hidden cost—service quality and assurance. While businesses may initially benefit from lower costs, the long-term repercussions can be disastrous, particularly when it comes to service reliability and the speed at which fibre outages are resolved.
The Trade-Off | Price vs. Quality
In the race to offer the lowest prices, many fibre providers cut corners on essential elements of service, such as customer support, proactive maintenance, and network infrastructure resilience. These cuts often mean:
Slower response times to outages: Reduced investment in skilled support staff and field technicians can lead to extended downtimes during fibre cuts or equipment failures.
Increased reliance on oversubscribed networks: To keep costs low, providers may oversubscribe their networks, leading to congestion and degraded performance during peak times.
Lack of service-level guarantees: When prices are driven down, service-level agreements (SLAs) that ensure fast recovery times and guaranteed uptime often fall by the wayside.
For businesses that depend on uninterrupted connectivity to maintain their operations, these factors can be devastating. The time it takes to resolve a fibre outage—especially when using a low-cost provider—can stretch far beyond what most businesses can afford.
The Business Impact of Prolonged Downtimes
When a fibre outage occurs, businesses without adequate continuity or resilience in place face:
Lost productivity: Employees and operations are stalled as key applications, such as cloud services, VoIP systems, and online tools, become inaccessible.
Revenue loss: Downtime directly impacts the bottom line, particularly for businesses reliant on e-commerce or online customer engagement.
Customer dissatisfaction: In industries such as financial services, retail, and customer support, prolonged downtimes can severely impact customer relationships and brand reputation.
Compliance risks: Many industries are bound by regulations requiring businesses to maintain continuous operations and safeguard data. Prolonged downtime can lead to violations and hefty penalties.
The Solution | Building Resilience with SD-WAN
The most effective way to mitigate the risks associated with low-quality last-mile fibre services is to adopt a solution that provides resilience and continuity. One such solution is Nepean Network’s SD-WAN, which offers zero downtime by leveraging multiple links from different providers. By intelligently routing traffic across multiple last-mile connections, Nepean Network’s SD-WAN ensures that even when a fibre outage occurs, your business remains online and operational.
Here’s how Nepean Network’s SD-WAN mitigates the risks:
Link Diversity: Nepean Network’s SD-WAN allows businesses to use multiple types of connectivity—whether fibre, fixed wireless, or mobile networks—across different providers. In the event of a failure on one link, traffic is seamlessly rerouted to the other, ensuring uninterrupted service.
Zero Downtime: With Nepean Network’s SD-WAN, businesses can achieve zero downtime by configuring policies that automatically failover traffic to a secondary or tertiary link without manual intervention.
Optimised Bandwidth Utilisation: Nepean Network’s SD-WAN dynamically allocates bandwidth across links based on network conditions, ensuring optimal performance even if a link experiences degradation.
Proactive Monitoring: The platform continuously monitors link health, and in the event of an issue, it can take immediate action to reroute traffic before an outage impacts the business.
Quality of Service (QoS): Nepean Network’s SD-WAN uses advanced QoS techniques to prioritise business-critical traffic, ensuring that essential applications like VoIP, video conferencing, and online transactions continue to perform even under degraded conditions.
Don’t Gamble with Connectivity
While cost-saving measures may look appealing on paper, the real costs of unreliable last-mile fibre services—whether in downtime, customer loss, or compliance risks—can far outweigh the initial savings. Businesses that rely on single, low-cost fibre providers are effectively gambling with their connectivity, and in today’s digital-first world, that’s a gamble they can’t afford.
The price squeeze on last-mile fibre services is an unfortunate trend, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of your business’s resilience. With a leading SD-WAN solution like Fusion's SD-WAN, businesses can safeguard themselves against connectivity failures, ensuring continuity, performance, and peace of mind, regardless of what happens on the last mile.
It’s time to stop viewing connectivity as a commodity and start seeing it as the critical asset it truly is.
