Vumatel’s affordable fibre plans for 2025

South Africa’s largest fibre network operator (FNO), Vumatel, has big plans to connect as many people as possible to its network as fast as possible in 2025, with its Vuma Key and Vuma Reach products being a priority.

It also wants to continue its rollouts to connect schools to its network, with the goal of connecting more than 200 South African schools in the coming year.

This is a marked change from 2024, when fibre rollouts slowed significantly as FNOs shifted their priorities to generating income from their assets to pay off the large debts they incurred building their networks.

Vumatel told MyBroadband that it wants to connect as many people as possible to its network as quickly as possible in 2025.

“Our immediate priority is rolling out fibre infrastructure to more underserved communities and delivering Vuma Reach and Vuma key to other communities across the country where we’ve already rolled out infrastructure,” it said.

“We are also committed to continuing our efforts to connect schools. Currently, we have connected over 800 schools and our target is to reach and — possibly — exceed 1,000 in the coming year.”

For reference, Vumatel’s Vuma Key and Vuma Reach products are prepaid and target lower-income households and regions in South Africa.

The 2024 fibre network slowdown is evident when comparing the number of homes passed by FNOs in the country in the first half of the year.

It should be noted that Frogfoot and Openserve are exceptions to the trend. However, even these FNOs aren’t rolling out large amounts of new coverage.

Openserve and Frogfoot’s networks saw the most significant expansion in H1 2024, with the former passing 70,980 homes with its network and Frogfoot passing 19,000 homes.

Vumatel passed just 3,584 more homes with its network in H1 2024.

Frogfoot CEO Shane Chorley previously told MyBroadband that the FNO has shifted to simple extensions of its existing network infrastructure.

“However, to be honest, there isn’t much left to build in high Living Standards Measure areas,” he said.

Chorley added that Frogfoot is now heavily focused on expanding its services to lower Living Standards Measure areas.

While Frogfoot hasn’t slowed down its deployments, Chorley acknowledged that other major players, particularly Vumatel, have slowed rollouts significantly.

However, he noted that many operators have shifted to building in lower Living Standards Measure areas and have started raising funding to accelerate such builds.

Vumatel’s rollouts almost came to a grinding halt in the second half of 2023.

The FNO’s latest annual results revealed that its network had passed 2,003,583 homes with its network by March 2024.

This came after it announced that it had exceeded 2 million homes passed in August 2023. This indicates that it only added between zero and 3,582 new homes to its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network in six months.

Its biggest competitor, Openserve, added 58,394 homes to its FTTH network between September 2023 and March 2024. However, its total number of homes passed the figure of 1,217,110 in March 2024, which was significantly lower than Vumatel’s.

A major factor contributing to the slowdown of fibre rollouts in South Africa is a potential deal that could’ve seen Vodacom acquire a 30%-40% share in Maziv.

The Competition Tribunal has blocked the deal from proceeding, but Vodacom and Vumatel’s parent company have said they will consider launching an appeal once the reasons for the refusal have been published.

Despite this setback, Vumatel has said it will continue its rollouts to lower-income and underserviced communities.

However, shareholder Remgro previously said that without the cash injection from Vodacom, the rollouts will be slower than they would have liked.