Vuma and Huawei team up to launch industry first 50G PON technology in South Africa

[Johannesburg, South Africa, July 6, 2023] Vuma, South Africa’s biggest Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) provider, has announced the integration of next generation fibre technology and innovation to the South African market, through its latest partnership with Huawei.

As a next-generation PON technology defined by ITU-T, the 50G PON effectively supports 10Gbps Everywhere. It provides high-density symmetrical 50G PON to meet the increasing bandwidth requirements in future campus, industrial interconnection, enterprise, and home scenarios. And it integrates GPON, 10G PON, and 50G PON into one port, allowing for service upgrade on demand.

The partnership sees the launch of 50G PON capabilities – significantly higher than the existing 2.5Gbps capabilities currently in use. Following its future testing phase, the deployment of this first to market technology will make considerably higher upload and download fibre broadband speeds accessible to Vuma customers across the provider’s FTTH network, meeting growing consumer demand for faster, higher capacity, and more stable connectivity.

“Vuma’s investment in the testing and rollout of the new Huawei PON technology is future-proofing our network, which will allow us to enable much more capacity over the last mile fibre and increase speeds as our customers require – approximately 20 times faster than the current capabilities deployed,” says Francois Swart, Chief Technology Officer at Vuma.

At the Huawei Eco-Connect sub-Saharan Africa 2023 launch event, President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line, Richard Jin, gave a keynote speech that mentioned that Huawei’s vision for the region and making truly high-speed connectivity more accessible to everyone.

"Fibre broadband will significantly promote innovation and employment for the country”, says Richard Jin. “However, the penetration rate of FBB in most of the African countries is much lower than global average. This is both a challenge and an opportunity.”

“We’ve launched the best technology currently available in the African market with our top customer, Vuma, which speaks volumes to the values of innovation and empowerment through connectivity that Huawei and Vuma share,” says Kim Jin, Vice President of Huawei Optical Business Product Line. “Through this partnership, our goal, much like Vuma’s, is to support increased connectivity access to all South Africans, and to bridge the gap in access to high quality digital services.”