Telkom copper and battery theft win

Telkom has seen a massive decline in incidents of copper cable and battery theft on its network in recent months, despite an increase in cases of site vandalism.

The telecoms company has told Sunday Times that its financial losses resulting from theft and vandalism on its network dropped from R10.1 million in the second quarter of 2023 to R3.8 million over the same period in 2024 — a reduction of 62%.

During this period, Telkom observed the following key improvements in infrastructure losses:

• Copper cable theft cases decreased from 253 to 100
• Fibre optic cable vandalism cases decreased from 294 to 80
• Battery thefts decreased from 244 to 64

These declines came despite incidents of site vandalism increasing from 400 to 634.

That could suggest that Telkom’s interventions might have led to criminals being less successful in securing the most valuable parts typically taken from key sites.

Telkom is part of a forum of four government-owned companies focused on combatting economic sabotage of critical infrastructure.

The other members are Eskom, Transnet, and Prasa, all of which have been heavily impacted by infrastructure theft and vandalism in recent years.

Telkom’s head of forensics, security, and insurance, Simile Ndlovu, told the Sunday Times that the company was happy that the numbers were declining.

However, he also highlighted a prevailing trend of Openserve technicians being robbed while expanding and fixing infrastructure, with criminals making off with their belongings.

“The biggest concern is that these robberies have a psychological impact on our colleagues,” Ndlovu said.

“If somebody gets robbed, you cannot expect to deploy the same person tomorrow. The employee has to go through counselling, and we need to make sure that the employee is ready to work.”

“This has an impact on productivity, particularly in remote areas where we have a limited number of employees,” Ndlovu said.

Construction mafia pains

Ndlovu also said that construction mafias and community forums impacted Telkom’s rollouts.

“Sometimes we want to expand our infrastructure, and the community will demand that people from that area be employed in the project. We are facing this challenge head-on,” Ndlovu said.

“There is a stakeholder framework that has been developed to ensure we use that crisis as a way of converting the same community to be our eyes and ears on the ground.”

Several fibre network operators (FNOs) — including the country’s biggest operator, Vumatel — have reported significant challenges with rollouts and maintenance due to construction mafias.

One highly problematic area for Vumatel has been Khayelitsha in the Western Cape, where it offers its low-income-focused Vuma Reach products.

Vumatel’s activity in that township has been on pause for over nine months due to violence against its contractors and threats by construction mafias and community forums.

Construction mafias have disrupted important infrastructure and business developments across a wide range of industries and in many parts of the country, although the most problematic areas are KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.

Telkom’s copper network shrinking

It should be noted that a part of Telkom’s copper cable theft decline might not be due to its crime-combatting efforts but because of its copper network’s size declining.

The company has been actively decommissioning its copper network in recent years as demand for its traditional fixed voice and ADSL services plummeted. Telkom has replaced some of its old copper cabling with fibre.

Fixed lines, including voice and ADSL, dropped from a peak of about 5.4 million in March 2000 to 609,000 by March 2024.

Significant improvements in cellular connectivity and coverage have meant that many South Africans no longer need or want telephones in their homes. At the same time, voice-over-IP services have replaced conventional lines in businesses.

At the same time, the rapid expansion of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) — a faster and higher bandwidth technology than ADSL — has eaten into Telkom’s fixed-line broadband customer base.

Telkom ADSL connections peaked at around 1.01 million in March 2016 but crashed to 71,800 eight years later.

Where it had a nearly 100% share of the fixed home broadband market in 2014, ADSL now accounts for less than 4% of these connections in South Africa.

Its market share is even less if one adds fixed-LTE, fixed-5G, and other fixed-wireless access (FWA) to the equation.

While Openserve is a major FTTH player, its 615,340 homes connected is much lower than what Telkom had with DSL.

Telkom missed a golden opportunity to leverage its existing trenched infrastructure to expand fibre at a faster rate than its rivals.

Its failure to capitalise has been blamed on overspending heavily on its mobile network to better compete with Vodacom and MTN, leaving less money for fixed connectivity upgrades and expansions.