VODACOM PROMISES TO UPGRADE ITS INFRASTRUCTURE IN JANE FURSE SOONEST

VODACOM PROMISES TO UPGRADE ITS INFRASTRUCTURE IN JANE FURSE SOONEST

By Thulane Madalane

Jane Furse: Jane Furse is an emerging town and earmarked adminstrative capital city of Sekhukhune District Municipality. Jane Furse is up among 189 settlements which are found in Makhuduthamaga which has a population of 274 358 people and 65 217 households, which amounts to more than 24% of the district, according to Census 2011. Like most towns in rural areas Jane Furse is characterized by a weak economic base, poor infrastructure, major service delivery backlogs, dispersed human settlements and high poverty levels. The poor infrastructure in Jane Furse includes weak network connectivity across all three major service providers like Vodacom,MTN and Cell C, Vodacom has majority of users amongst the three, which means it affect daily operations of individual users, businesses, service centres and some of government departments which are based in Jane Furse. Lately loadshedding has also added salt to this bleeding wound of poor network connectivity. Timeless News spoke to Vodacom regarding the poor network connectivity in Jane Furse, “ We are aware of challenges of network connectivity in Jane Furse which is largely due to influx of people to the area for various reasons like settlements or shopping since the place has many convenient centres however we have already taken a decision to erect two high mast network towers in Mashishing Madibong and Vergelegen C where we identified weakness in terms of connectivity and it will happen before the end of our current financial year” said Vodacom in a statement. The similar challenges were experienced by Ward 11,12,13,14,15 and 35 in Fetakgomo-Tubatse Local Municipality some years back but their then Ward Councillor Mphela Ratsoma wrote a letter to Vodacom regarding the connectivity challenges that they faced at time, even though it took awhile to resolve the but finally they erected a tower which helped in restoration of the network and more than 100 people were given free smartphones in affected wards. We hope that this problem will solved early because most of informal businesses depend on network for survival. Makhuduthamaga Local Municipality LED Department has earmarked Jane Furse as a future logistic hub during their LED strategic session last year now the question is how are they going to achieve this without proper planning and good infrastructure in place? Timeless News efforts of getting the views of the Municipality on the matter were unsuccessful by the time of going to press.