Fixed broadband subscribers accounted for 567,289 of the remaining fixed-line customers, down 2.9% from 584,189.<\/p>\n
Given that the fixed broadband decline is lower than the overall fixed line drop, it would appear that most cancellations came from customers who only used a Telkom fixed line for telephone services, and not accessing the Internet.<\/p>\n
The graph below shows the declines in fixed-access lines and fixed broadband customers from March 2016 to March 2023.<\/p>\n
The overall decline in fixed customers comes despite Telkom significantly increasing its FTTH base over the same period.<\/p>\n As of March 2023, the telecoms operator had 492,812 homes connected with its fibre, a big jump of 26.7% from the 389,109 it had in March 2022.<\/p>\n Its fibre network also passes more homes. Whereas Openserve’s FTTH network reached 839,691 households by March 2022, it had passed 1,040,565 a year later \u2014 an increase of 23.9%.<\/p>\n That means 47.4% of homes with access to Openserve fibre use the network.<\/p>\n This figure, referred to as the connectivity rate \u2014 is an important measure for fibre network operators, as it indicates whether they are getting uptake and making a return on their investment.<\/p>\n Openserve’s figure is among the highest in the industry.<\/p>\n While Telkom does not publish precise numbers for its declining DSL customer base, a figure can be calculated by subtracting the number of homes connected to fibre from the total fixed broadband subscribers.<\/p>\n That suggests Telkom had about 74,477 DSL customers remaining in South Africa, down 37% from the roughly 118,611 it had a year earlier.<\/p>\n The graph below shows how Telkom’s FTTH and DSL subscribers changed between 2016 and 2023.<\/p>\n Telkom CEO Serame Taukobong said because of the growth in FTTH, next-generation revenue now accounted for nearly 70% of Telkom’s fixed revenue base.<\/p>\n “Fixed data next-generation revenue grew by 10.2%, driven by the increased rollout of fibre and healthy growth in carrier services and enterprise services,” said Taukobong.<\/p>\n Fixed data consumption on Openserve’s network grew 13.8% and is just shy of 1,900 petabytes, or 1.9 billion gigabytes.<\/p>\n Taukobong added that fixed performance was limited by pricing gaps between the new-generation and legacy businesses, as declines in fixed-voice and legacy revenues accelerated during the year.<\/p>\n As a result, Telkom’s total fixed-service revenue declined from roughly R13.65 billion in March 2022 to R12.32 billion \u2014 a 9.7% drop.<\/p>\n Taukobong said although Telkom’s costs were well managed and grew by less than inflation, significant increases in backup power due to unreliable energy supply put pressure on profitability.<\/p>\n Openserve said it maintained high network availability over its access, transport, and core network layers \u2014 achieving 99.89%, 99.50%, and 99.99% uptime, respectively.<\/p>\n Although Telkom’s wholesale fixed-line division Openserve added over 100,000 customers to its residential fibre network, it lost over 200,000 fixed subscribers in the same period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":462258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,28470],"tags":[23297,20153,873,999,35,33386,1355,109],"class_list":["post-496093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adsl","category-fibre","tag-digital-subscriber-line-dsl","tag-fibre-to-the-home-ftth","tag-fixed-broadband","tag-fixed-lines","tag-headline","tag-openserve","tag-serame-taukobong","tag-telkom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496093"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496093"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":496119,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496093\/revisions\/496119"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Telkom-fixed-subscribers-graph_2016-to-2023.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Telkom-DSL-vs-fibre-customers-\u2014-2016-to-2023-.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nNow read: South Africa’s fastest broadband neighbourhoods \u2014 with a Pretoria surprise<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"