South Africa’s explosion of fibre network operators

Before 2014, South Africans were held ransom by limited broadband service providers and expensive fixed wireless data packages. In the past few years, an explosion of fibre networks has made high-speed broadband more widely accessible.

South Africa’s growing list of fibre network operators (FNOs) features at least 38 companies that provide either fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) or fibre-to-the-business (FTTB) connectivity. Prices have also plummeted since the early days of the service.

Some prominent FTTH providers — like Frogfoot, Openserve and Vumatel — have also started rolling out lower-cost fibre networks to less-affluent neighbourhoods of South Africa.

Although fibre optic networks had been around for years, a decisive moment for South African FTTH rollouts happened in 2014 when Vumatel’s fibre network launched in Parkhurst.

The rollout of fibre in South Africa brought substantial improvements to home broadband speeds — which were limited to ADSL and VDSL before FTTH became widely available.

Telkom offers a maximum download speed of 40Mbps on its DSL products, while fibre packages available in South Africa reach speeds of up to 1Gbps.

Fibre connections also offer higher upload speeds than copper-based Internet connections.

A MyBroadband comparison previously revealed that fibre pricing had dropped as much as 85% since the early days of the service in South Africa.

Another recent comparison showed that fibre pricing tends to be lower per megabit than old copper-based broadband.

It also confirmed that fibre packages become more cost-effective at higher speeds when considering the price per megabit per second.

A list of South Africa’s fibre network operators is summarised in the table below.

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