Implementing a municipal Metropolitan Area Network in Africa: A case study in the City of Cape Town

The City of Cape Town is engaged in building a metro area optic fiber and MPLS network to lower the cost of its own telecommunications and render more effective and efficient service to its employees. The network is designed to meet the City´s own needs and also to encourage commercial service providers to compete in order to reduce the cost of Internet service to Cape Town residents. This paper gives an overview of the motivation for building a City-owned network, the architecture followed and the initial results obtained, as well as the effect the network has had on the stated problem.