Mweb’s Fon network is dead

Mweb’s Fon network is dead, the company has confirmed to MyBroadband. Quietly shut down in 2018, Fon was a Wi-Fi network concept whose time never came.

Mweb announced its partnership with Fon in January 2014, offering its uncapped ADSL customers free access to the global Wi-Fi network.

Fon was a participant-driven service premised on members providing some of their bandwidth in exchange for access to its global Wi-Fi hotspot network.

Members were given a special Wi-Fi router that created a secondary Fon hotspot on their network.

Other members could then connect to that hotspot if they were nearby. Fon also sold access passes for people who weren’t hotspot contributors.

To promote the initiative, Mweb gave all its ADSL customers a free Fon-enabled router and Wi-Fi range extender.

Fon users were also given free access to Mweb’s Wi-Fi hotspots around the country.

While the network operated for a few years, paid-for and membership-based public Wi-Fi access never took off in South Africa.

Mweb also went through a period of turbulent corporate action that impacted its Wi-Fi networks.

Mweb FON router

Naspers founded Mweb in 1997 and took the South African market by storm with its Big Black Box dial-up product that promised to make Internet access easy.

The company had a good run, including introducing uncapped ADSL in 2010, but by 2013, Naspers was looking for a buyer to take Mweb off its hands.

It sold Mweb Business to Dimension Data in 2014 for around R368 million. This included Mweb’s Wi-Fi network.

In March 2015, Mweb’s Wi-Fi network was integrated into a new entity alongside AlwaysOn, a hotspot service operated by Dimension Data subsidiary Internet Solutions.

The new company, WirelessCo, was a joint venture between Dimension Data and Naspers. Dimension Data owned 51%, and Naspers 49%.

Mweb’s standalone Wi-Fi brand was shut down, and Fon users were informed they could use AlwaysOn’s hotspots for free.

In November 2015, Dimension Data and Naspers announced that WirelessCo would be called VAST Networks.

VAST would deliver carrier-grade open-access Wi-Fi in Southern Africa, beginning with its already extensive indoor coverage in hotels, shopping centres, restaurants, and airports.

It would also provide wholesale access to unlicensed wireless network capacity for mobile operators.

Called LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U), the idea was to provide operators with additional bandwidth over Wi-Fi’s relatively new 5GHz band — what would later become known as Wi-Fi 5.

Back then, South Africa’s mobile network operators were severely spectrum-constrained.

The South African government had made no progress on licensing the high-demand radio frequency spectrum operators needed for their LTE/4G networks.

Instead, they were “refarming” spectrum from their existing 2G and 3G networks to roll out LTE.

In such a spectrum-starved environment, wholesale open-access Wi-Fi and LTE-U sounded like a winner.

Unfortunately, it proved to be a dud.

VAST struggled to make money, and Naspers and Dimension Data grew tired of funding the loss-making company.

During this time, Naspers sold Mweb’s consumer division to Internet Solutions for roughly R130 million, meaning Dimension Data now owned the whole company.

As late as June 2017, the official line from Internet Solutions was that there were no plans to shut down its Fon offering.

However, by 2018, Dimension Data and Naspers were shopping around for a buyer for Vast with Investec. That was also the year Mweb decommissioned its Fon service.

A few prominent telecommunications players were interested in VAST’s assets, notably Vodacom and Link Africa.

However, VAST’s owners could not reach a deal with the suitors and announced on 25 October 2019 that the company would be shut down and its assets liquidated.