Big plans for township fibre — including prepaid streaming vouchers
Isizwe — the fibre network operator connecting Kayamandi households with 100Mbps fibre for as little as R5 a day — has big plans for the future, including creating a lower entry point for streaming in the suburb.
MyBroadband spoke to Isizwe CEO Steve Briggs about its progress in Kayamandi and its future plans.
Briggs said Isizwe had increased the number of homes connected to its network from 3,000 to 4,500 in just over a month.
“We recently connected another chunk of the Kayamandi population, this time using Wi-Fi on a kind of gum pole, if you can call it that,” he said.
“We call it a fibre tower, and that’s brought on about another 1,500 homes. We have now connected approximately 4,500 homes in Kayamandi.”
Isizwe aims to increase its number of homes connected from 4,500 to 22,000 by March 2023.
Briggs said the towers are connected using power-over-fibre cabling, making Isizwe’s Wi-Fi network in Kayamandi immune to load-shedding.
“We are running a power-over-fibre cable, if you can call it that, from our main operating node, which keeps the Wi-Fi access points up even when there’s load-shedding,” he explained.
“So effectively, there’s a battery backup, not on each fibre tower, but actually at a central point.”
“I guess you could compare it to something like power-over-ethernet, which keeps the Wi-Fi access points up,” Briggs added.
Isizwe has also been piloting Showmax vouchers to create a lower entry point for Kayamandi residents to access streaming services.
Steve Briggs, Isizwe CEO
“We’ve done some interesting pilots. One of them is with Showmax,” Briggs said.
“Showmax is working with us on a bundle solution, where our users in Kayamandi can benefit from a Showmax pass.”
“We hope over the next few weeks to continue working with them and others to sell vouchers through our VulaCoin wallet, effectively making post-paid-type products like that more palatable to the prepaid market,” he added.
VulaCoin is a crypto token on the Solana blockchain that Isizwe uses for subscribers to buy Internet access time on its network.
As it is a crypto token, people can also trade VulaCoins amongst themselves for other purposes.
Isizwe intends to expand the voucher feature to other products, such as game streaming and insurance, over the next few months.
Briggs said Isizwe has seen significant uptake with its user base and starting to see usage patterns as the number of users on the service increases.
“We’ve seen good uptake on our user base. We’ve now got over 10,000 active registered users, and we keep setting new records in the number of concurrent users,” he said.
“We are now over 700 concurrent users at peak time, which is around 21:30.”
Isizwe launched the first phase of its network — in partnership with reputable companies like Liquid Intelligent Technologies, EasyEquities, Nokia, Asla, Cambium Networks, and Hexatronic — on 7 November 2022.
It connected 3,000 homes in the Kayamandi township near Stellenbosch with uncapped fibre broadband boasting an average download speed of 100Mbps.
Residents in Kayamandi pay roughly R5 per day by using a specially-created stablecoin called VulaCoin to access the service.
The company aims to connect 180 million homes and serve one billion customers with uncapped pay-as-you-go fibre-to-the-home Internet in the coming years, starting with a minimum of 10Mbps speeds.
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