{"id":541203,"date":"2024-06-18T09:04:56","date_gmt":"2024-06-18T07:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=541203"},"modified":"2024-06-18T09:10:03","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T07:10:03","slug":"telkom-fixed-line-carnage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/fibre\/541203-telkom-fixed-line-carnage.html","title":{"rendered":"Telkom fixed-line carnage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Telkom’s latest annual results show that the company has shed around 184,000 fixed-line subscribers in the past year.<\/p>\n

Telkom’s fixed-access lines, which include subscribers with copper voice and broadband packages, dropped 23.2% from 793,000 in March 2023 to 609,000 by March 2024.<\/p>\n

That means the company lost nearly a quarter of its fixed-access customers in a year.<\/p>\n

Telkom had a monopoly on fixed copper voice and broadband services for around two decades.<\/p>\n

However, the growth of Internet-based mobile voice and heavy competition from fibre network operators (FNOs) in the fixed-line market has all but eradicated its advantage.<\/p>\n

Telkom’s latest fixed-line losses were somewhat offset by growth in fibre services.<\/p>\n

While Telkom retail’s own fixed broadband subscriber base continued to decline year-on-year, this drop was much less pronounced, with a 2.2% decrease from 567,289 to 554,953.<\/p>\n

Its Internet all-access subscribers, which includes copper and fibre customers, increased 2.5% from a year ago to 246,398 customers.<\/p>\n

That shows that the big drop in fixed access lines is primarily due to customers dropping conventional telephone lines.<\/p>\n

Telkom’s Internet all-access subscriber boost can be attributed to its wholesale division Openserve significantly expanding its fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) network, which has also boosted external revenues.<\/p>\n

Openserve passed over 1.2 million households with fibre\u00a0by the end of March 2024.<\/p>\n

“Openserve invested R2.547 billion to modernise its network and drive fibre deployment to pass 1,217,110 homes, a 17.0% increase,” Telkom said.<\/p>\n

“Its connect-led strategy continues to see positive results, enabling it to increase its homes connected by 19.8% to 590,527.”<\/p>\n

With this growth, Openserve remains the second biggest fibre network operator (FNO) by households passed and connected.<\/p>\n

It is second to Vumatel, which passed over 2 million homes in late 2023 and connected 664,000.<\/p>\n

The proportion of households that have access to and connect to Openserve’s network is much higher.<\/p>\n

Vumatel’s connectivity ratio was last reported to be around 33.2%, meaning that about one in every three households with access to its network have taken up a Vumatel package.<\/p>\n

The 590,527 Openserve FTTH customers make up 48.5% of the 1,217,110 households with access to its network.<\/p>\n

That is 1.1 percentage points more than a year ago and means that almost half of the households that have access to Openserve fibre are connected to its network.<\/p>\n

The connectivity ratio is an important metric used to measure the effectiveness of FNO rollout strategies.<\/p>\n

If the connectivity ratio is low, it can indicate that there was little or insufficient demand for an FNO’s service in certain areas.<\/p>\n

However, it can also just signal that an operator is expanding aggressively by rolling out faster than customers can take up its service.<\/p>\n

\"Openserve

Openserve infrastructure in Midstream Estate<\/p><\/div>\n

Telkom’s external revenues<\/h2>\n

The growth in fibre on Openserve’s network has increased the contribution of next-generation revenue to 93% of Openserve’s total external wholesale revenue.<\/p>\n

External wholesale revenue includes the revenue Openserve made from the numerous third-party Internet service providers \u2014 including Afrihost, Webafrica, RSAWeb, and others \u2014 that resell its FTTH services.<\/p>\n

This figure \u2014 which excludes Telkom retail revenue \u2014 increased 10.7% to R4.526 billion.<\/p>\n

“This external growth contributed to the total NGN fibre revenue, which grew by 7.4% and now represents 76.4% of Openserve’s overall revenue of R12.511 billion,” Telkom said.<\/p>\n

Telkom also said that Openserve provided an exceptional customer experience, with “industry-leading” network availability uptimes of 99.86%, 99.85% and 100% across its access, transport, and core network layers, respectively.<\/p>\n

“The resilience and high availability of its network could also be seen through the growth in data consumption of 2,307 petabytes, an increase of 21.7%,” Telkom said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Telkom lost nearly a quarter of its fixed-access subscriber lines in the past year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":467825,"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":[28470],"tags":[71,3628,90260,873,35,33386,109],"class_list":["post-541203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fibre","tag-adsl-2","tag-copper","tag-copper-networks","tag-fixed-broadband","tag-headline","tag-openserve","tag-telkom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541203"}],"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=541203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541227,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541203\/revisions\/541227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}