Breaking the 1Gbps fibre barrier in South Africa

It may be a long time before many South African households can enjoy 10Gbps fibre speeds in their homes, due to the current limits of in-home network hardware and operator-side infrastructure used in the country.

However, at least one operator could offer speeds of 2Gbps or higher in the near future.

The fastest speed available on consumer fibre packages has been 1Gbps since 2014, when Vumatel launched its Parkhurst project.

1Gbps packages far exceeded the bandwidth requirements of many households over the past decade.

However, there has been rapid adoption of data-heavy applications like video streaming and file sharing in more recent years.

Fibre network operator (FNO) Vumatel was the first to announce plans to launch a 10Gbps fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) service in 2021.

It initially said the product would launch in April 2021, after a four-week trial.

However, the company has since gone completely quiet on the product despite asserting that testing went well.

MyBroadband has sent Vumatel multiple queries about its 10Gbps plans over the past few years but the FNO has never provided a reason why the launch did not go as planned.

When MyBroadband queried the company about any potential plans to offer packages with speeds over 1Gbps, it declined to provide feedback.

We subsequently asked all the country’s major FNOs whether they had plans to offer FTTH packages with speeds in excess of 1Gbps.

MetroFibre and Frogfoot did not have good news for their customers hoping for a faster option.

MetroFibre chief commercial officer Dr Christian Wirtz said the FNO was seeing very strong demand for products at “real” fibre speeds of 250Mbps to 1Gbps.

“This is driven by data-intensive applications like streaming, gaming, video conferencing, cloud computing and remote work, and the ability of FTTH to deliver these speeds reliably,” Wirtz said.

Frogfoot chief product officer David Coleman also expects a gradual shift towards higher speeds and consumer demand starting to breach the current 1Gbps ceiling.

“In the local market, we have also observed a shift in the standard packages on offer where the entry-level speeds have shifted to above 50Mbps,” Coleman said.

Wirtz explained that facilitating symmetrical download and upload speeds of 10Gbps required XGS-PON or 10-Gigabit PON technology.

As it stands, a lot of the fibre infrastructure in South Africa uses GPON, which typically supports up to 2.5Gbps download speeds and 1.25Gbps upload speeds.

“As soon as XGS-PON technology and services become more relevant for consumers, MetroFibre will be in a position to offer these high-performance products to the market at attractive rates,” Wirtz said.

“While not on the cards for this year, we are already working to future-proof our FTTH network using XGS-PON technology to allow higher speeds beyond 1Gbps for the FTTH market, as we anticipate that the demand for these speeds will grow.”

Coleman said Frogfoot was continually researching enhancements to its offering and preparing for further upgrades to the network and deployment equipment that would support offerings between 1Gbps and 10Gbps in the foreseeable future.

However, these products will not be rolled out in the next 12 months.

A surprise from down south?

Cape Town-based Octotel may be the first to launch a higher-speed product.

The company’s chief operating officer, Scott Cunningham, said Octotel had assessed demand for higher bandwidth services and believed there was a requirement to offer a premium service between 2Gbps and 10Gbps.

“This has been closely reviewed, and in our opinion, there would be an increasing demand once the product is presented to the market,” Octotel said.

The FNO’s research and design teams have successfully concluded network testing and the company will be engaging with prominent industry-leading service providers to begin the planning phase for the product release.

It said although a launch date was yet to be decided, the rollout was “imminent” as part of a broader strategy.

2.5Gbps the next stop?

10Gbps FTTH has been tested in limited pilots by senior personnel at several ISPs.

Vumatel’s 10Gbps FTTH was installed in the home of Cool Ideas co-founder Paul Butschi in 2022.

Despite using an industrial-grade router and cutting-edge PC with the latest networking equipment, the highest speed test he recorded was 4.3Gbps.

More recently, Afrihost senior manager Mark Maritz told MyBroadband he has been testing a 10Gbps home line from a smaller FNO Purple Forest since August 2024.

While keeping his setup as close to a regular home consumer’s as possible, he was able to achieve 8Gbps downloads from a server at the Gallo Manor data centre using a TP-Link router.

Maritz believes that 10Gbps is not the future yet due to hardware and device limitations, particularly when it came to getting customers to understand the immense requirements to achieve 10Gbps.

However, he contends the industry was “very close” to replacing 1Gbps with 2.5Gbps as the new top-end option. He has also been testing a 2.5Gbps line at his home.

This speed would make more sense considering the maximum throughput of GPON technology.