How many homes can get Vumatel fibre in South Africa

Vumatel’s network currently passes around 240,000 homes in South Africa, a portion of which take up fibre services.

“Basically, every two and half minutes a new subscriber is switching to fibre,” said Vumatel CEO Niel Schoeman at the 2017 MyBroadband Conference.

Schoeman said their network is transporting a “staggering” volume of data traffic, and in Parkhurst alone they see more traffic on average than what passes through the Durban Internet Exchange.

He said in the beginning of their fibre expansion, they noticed that people were downloading a lot, especially through BitTorrent, but access to abundant bandwidth soon caused this behaviour to change.

As users realised they don’t have to download and hold data, that they can consume it as they need it, the amount of traffic from large downloads plateaued.

2.5 million homes

Vumatel recently announced an ambitious plan to connect South Africa’s townships with fibre, beginning in Alexandra in Johannesburg.

It plans to offer an uncapped 100Mbps fibre package for R89 per month.

Should the pilot in Alexandra succeed, Vumatel will expand the initiative to Diepsloot.

If the company is able to successfully connect Diepsloot, it will then connect every township the Vumatel network touches – connecting 10 million residents in 2.5 million homes within the next two years.