VUMA wins 2025 MyBroadband Award for Best Fibre Network Operator

VUMA has won the 2025 MyBroadband Award for Best Fibre Network Operator.

It achieved this award following extensive research into the performance of South Africa’s leading fibre network operators (FNOs).

This involved analysing over 25,000 speed tests conducted on the MyBroadband Speed Test app. 

Based on this data — which included download speeds, upload speeds, latency scores, jitter scores, and user voting — MyBroadband generated an overall score for each major South African FNO.

VUMA had the highest overall score of all FNOs — making it the deserving winner of this award.

Driving the industry forward

VUMA’s victory is unsurprising, as for the past decade, VUMA has been at the forefront of fibre Internet rollout in South Africa.

It launched its historic Parkhurst project in 2014, which proved that rolling out FTTH in South Africa was financially feasible if a neighbourhood showed sufficient interest.

This sparked the development of an FTTH “land-grab” where top FNOs competed to reach new neighbourhoods with fibre network infrastructure.

VUMA once again has led the way in this regard, and is recognised as South Africa’s biggest FNO.

In January 2025, MyBroadband reported that VUMA had nearly one million FTTH customers — almost as many home Internet customers as Telkom had at the peak of the DSL Internet era.

This is particularly impressive as Telkom was effectively uncontested in the DSL industry, whereas VUMA has accrued its current customer base while facing stiff competition.

In total, VUMA’s network covers over 2 million households, while its nearest competitor covers about 1.3 million homes and has about 650,000 households connected.

The future is exciting

VUMA told MyBroadband that it expects demand for FTTH will continue to grow steadily in 2025.

This is because more consumers are adopting digital services and increasing their bandwidth requirements.

VUMA said it will simultaneously look to expand its network coverage and improve connection rates on its existing infrastructure.

It has also placed a strong focus on lower-income neighbourhoods and informal settlements in recent years.

This includes the launch of South Africa’s cheapest-ever 10Mbps FTTH product — Vuma Key — in Alexandra in September 2024.

Vuma Key is targeted at households with a combined income of under R5,000 per month, while the Vuma Reach product is aimed at households earning between R5,000 and R30,000 per month.