Short answer
Business fibre is highly reliable and is the primary connectivity medium for most businesses, but it is not immune to failure. Last-mile cuts, provider outages and congestion still happen, so FirstNet recommends managed redundancy alongside fibre at any site where downtime costs revenue.
In detail
What FirstNet business fibre includes:
- Symmetric or asymmetric, uncapped service, uncontended on local (on-net) traffic
- A FirstNet-managed router monitored through PRTG, with 24x7 NOC support
- Availability targets up to 99.5% on premium networks and 99% on standard networks, with a service-credit schedule
- International contention capped at 1:4, and only during undersea cable failures
- Dedicated, uncontended variants for mission-critical sites
Reliability in practice also depends on how quickly a fault is restored. A fibre cut needs physical repair, so FirstNet pairs fibre with a diverse backup on revenue-impacting sites: licensed microwave for air-versus-trench diversity, LTE/5G or fixed wireless for fast failover, or a second fibre on another carrier. LTE/5G is not affected by fibre cuts or cable theft, which makes it a strong fibre backup. Because last-mile quality and repair times vary by region and provider in South Africa, FirstNet designs across multiple providers rather than relying on one.
Source: FirstNet Connectivity service page →
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