Frogfoot appoints new CEO

Frogfoot Networks founder Abraham van der Merwe is stepping down as CEO of the fibre network operator to take up the position of Vivica Group chief strategy officer.
Vivica owns Frogfoot and Internet service provider Vox Telecom, among several other businesses.
Shane Chorley (pictured) will take over from Van der Merwe as Frogfoot CEO.
Van der Merwe will be responsible for Vivica Group’s corporate development, strategy formulation, and execution across its subsidiaries.
Before joining Frogfoot, Chorley served in various leadership roles in Vox Telecommunications since 1999.
He served as head of carrier and connectivity at Vox Telecom for over a decade and as Frogfoot’s sales and marketing head for six.
According to the companies, Chorley was instrumental in Vox’s acquisition of Frogfoot in 2015.
Vox Holdings rebranded as Vivica Group in 2022, restructuring its business into several subsidiary sister companies, including Vox and Frogfoot.
Chorley joined Frogfoot in 2016 to lead its sales and marketing, where he helped build Frogfoot into one of the largest fibre operators in South Africa.
Frogfoot says it provides services to over 190 wholesale providers, 13,000 businesses and 135,000 residential customers.
A recent MyBroadband analysis shows that Frogfoot is the third-largest fibre network operator in South Africa by homes connected, only behind Vumatel and Openserve.
According to Chorley, the executive shake-up is all part of the plan to grow the Vivica Group.
Although he believes Van der Merwe is more of an asset at the group level, he said that the Frogfoot founder remains a critical member of the team and “will still play a very active role” at the fibre network operator.
“It is a very emotional decision for me to relinquish control of this very special company I have built over more than two decades, but I cannot think of a more deserving person to lead Frogfoot than Shane Chorley,” said Van der Merwe.
Van der Merwe said Chorley has been by his side since the beginning of their journey to become a leading open-access fibre operator in South Africa.
“His fingerprints are all over Frogfoot, and he has gradually taken over more and more of my responsibilities over the past few years as my focus shifted to supporting other group companies and expanding the group into other markets.”
Chorley said that in the past year, they invested significantly in network upgrades and service experience tools to improve uptime and overall customer experience.
These improvements include deploying a national long-distance dark fibre network and investing significantly into improving the uptime of nodes on its own networks, as well as those of partners, during higher stages of load-shedding.
“Key plans going forward include constantly growing our fibre footprint to deliver more value to our customers, expanding our network into townships to try and get fibre to all and extending our product offering to add Fibre To The Tower (FTTT),” Chorley said.
“It is critical we build a business that is known for its customer service, uptime and ability to deliver value to our customers.”
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