Good news for people who don’t have Internet in South Africa
BMI TechKnowledge (BMIT) predicts that fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and fixed-wireless access (FWA) connections in South Africa will increase significantly by 2029.
This is according to the firm’s 2025 South African Broadband Report, which predicts that FTTH connections will increase by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8% between 2024 and 2029.
According to Chris Geerdts, BMIT managing director, FTTH rollouts slowed between 2023 and 2024, following a significant acceleration in previous years.
Geerdts expects rollouts to pick up again, based on fibre network operators (FNOs) moving into lower-income urban markets.
In BMIT’s South African Broadband Report for 2024, the firm estimated that of the 3.2 million addressable homes in the upper-income market, 3.1 million already had access to at least one FNO.
It also said that 48.7% of the upper-income homes were connected to a fibre network. However, its data showed that these figures were far lower in the middle and lower-income brackets.
Only 2.2 million of the 4.3 million addressable middle-income homes had been passed, and 16.5% had been connected.
The firm said there are around five million addressable lower-income homes, of which only 100,000 have been passed, and 0.4% are connected to a network.
Therefore, many households that would like to use FTTH services may be unable to access them because of this constraint, forcing them to opt for alternatives like fixed-LTE and fixed-5G.
BMIT expects the lion’s share of new subscriptions up to 2029 will come from fixed-wireless access demand, specifically fixed-mobile, with 5G rapidly cementing its place in the South African market.
“BMIT predicts that 5G will account for 67% of all residential fixed-mobile router connections by 2029, up from 34% in 2024,” the firm said.
It said this growth will be supported by operators like MTN, Vodacom, Telkom, and Rain, which are aggressively expanding 5G coverage and offering attractively priced, seemingly uncapped packages.
BMIT’s report predicts that the total local broadband market will reach R82.8 billion in revenue by 2029, driven by an anticipated increase of 3.7 million active subscriptions over 2024-2029.
According to Geerdts, the broadband access market continues to offer opportunities in the mid-term, particularly for operators with a business model suited to deployment to lower-incomer households.
BMIT-forecasted FTTH and fixed-mobile broadband connections in South Africa
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