It’s hard to imagine a suburban home in 2025 that’s not connected to some kind of streaming service – whether it’s Netflix or DStv, YouTube or Spotify, Crunchyroll or (for the #WFH holdouts) Microsoft Teams. Similarly, it’s all but impossible to picture a modern urban business that doesn’t have fast and reliable broadband connectivity.

One estimate, by Africa Analysis, sees South Africa having more than 7 million consumer broadband lines by 2030, with fibre making up about 60% of those. Fibre connections – be they to the home (FTTH), to the business (FTTB) or to anywhere (FTTx) – are expanding across Africa’s largest economy, quickly becoming the de facto form of connecting people and businesses to the global digital economy… And it’s going ‘quickly’ in every sense.

For the past decade, 1 gigabyte per second (Gbps) has been the fastest FTTH speed available to the South African public. However, in August, rumours started online that a large South African fibre network operator (FNO) was ‘close’ to cracking that glass ceiling, with plans to launch the country’s first FTTH packages with speeds higher than 1 Gbps.

At the same time, Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) reported that it had successfully transmitted an unprecedented 1.6 terabits per second (Tbit/s) on a single wavelength over a 40 km section of its core network between Isando and Midrand. This, according to DFA, quadrupled the capacity from an earlier test that reached 400 gigabits per second on the same route.

What’s exciting about South Africa’s continuing FTTx roll-out is not just the speed, but the spread. Fibre connections are now fairly standard in the country’s main metro areas. The pavements have long since been dug up, the fibre-optic cables installed and the services offered to urban and suburban homes and businesses.

Now the industry is looking to what’s next, where’s next and who’s next.

In August, DFA’s parent company, Maziv, announced a ZAR12 billion, five-year infrastructure investment that aims to deliver fibre internet access to as many buildings as it can reach. ‘There are over 6 million homes covered by fibre at this point,’ Dietlof Mare, CEO of Maziv, told MyBroadband. ‘The goal is to cover as close to the 18.5 million households in South Africa as possible.’

That would mean expanding the national fibre footprint to include middle-income (ZAR5 000–ZAR30 000 per month) and low-income (under ZAR5 000) households.

Telecoms parastatal Telkom intends to do just that, using the 180 000 km infrastructure of its subsidiary, Openserve, to expand fibre access into the country’s most underserved communities. Telkom’s plan is to piggyback on a contract to install fibre at government buildings, expanding the network to nearby homes, schools and micro businesses.

‘The issue isn’t just about who has internet and who doesn’t,’ says Strini Mandri, national sales manager at Telkom Business. ‘It’s about the quality of access, whether people can work, study and participate meaningfully in the digital economy. This is about long-term value.’

Mandri adds that the roll-out in remote or rural areas could not rely on conventional channels. ‘It had to be on the ground, where people are,’ he said. ‘If we want to support inclusive growth across the country, we have to bring more people and businesses online.’

The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies allocated ZAR710 million of its 2025/26 budget to expanding free WiFi and public broadband through its SA Connect programme, which aims to reach 5.5 million households by the end of 2026. Again, the idea is to use the existing fibre infrastructure for state-owned enterprise to deploy broadband internet to communities.

To that end, South Africa’s communications minister, Solly Malatsi, and electricity and energy minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, have agreed to map the country’s public fibre network to help cut costs.

‘Currently, different SOEs (like Eskom, Transnet and Prasa) each run their own fibre lines to support operations. Often those lines run along the same corridors, which means parallel builds, higher costs and spare capacity sitting unused while communities still wait for broadband,’ Malatsi said in a post on X. ‘We agreed to begin the process of co-ordinating across the state in order to map public fibre, utilise spare capacity and avoid duplicate builds. Our goal is to spend smarter and turbocharge last-mile connectivity.’

However, much to the industry’s frustration, while connection speeds are increasing and plans are expanding, South Africa’s fibre deployment is actually slowing. The great fibre ‘land grab’ has now become a period of consolidation, with several major FNOs choosing to focus instead on increasing active customer numbers in their existing areas. Only 34% of homes with access to MetroFibre’s FTTH network, for example, have an active line.

Another reason for the slowdown is regulatory red tape. In 2021 Vodacom announced its proposed acquisition of a 30% stake in Maziv (which owns both DFA and Vumatel). At that stage, South African FNOs were rolling out to about 400 000 new homes per quarter. But as the transaction spent three-and-a-half years between the Competition Commission, the Competition Tribunal and the Competition Appeal Court, the industry went into wait-and-see mode… and fibre deployments dropped to fewer than 80 000 homes per quarter.

‘Just make things faster,’ Mare recently sighed on the TechCentral Show – and not without just cause. ‘It’s easy to overcomplicate things, but then you sit with 31 000 pages of documents; now who is going to read that? How much is that going to cost the [transaction] parties? What is it going to cost the government? I think we could have used all that money to deploy fibre faster.’

With the deal now approved, Maziv has committed to spending ZAR9 billion on expanding its fibre footprint by a million homes, 350 000 of which will be in low-income areas.

Even then, though, South Africa’s deployment of super-fast fibre will, in many geographies, be hamstrung by the same thing that’s hobbling the country’s other infrastructure projects: business forums, or the infamous ‘construction mafia’.

Paul Colmer, an executive committee member for the Wireless Access Providers Association, indicated as much in an interview with Cape Talk. ‘I think the real thing we’re looking at here is the sabotage, and the damage that’s being done to these networks is somewhat the plague of business forums.’

Colmer claimed that some business forums were deliberately disrupting, damaging or destroying fibre infrastructure. ‘If they steal it, it is likely they will get the job to replace it,’ he said. ‘The vandalism or theft of it is really creating opportunities to reinstall it.’

Nevertheless, in its latest State of the ICT Sector Report, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa highlighted ‘remarkable growth’ in the local telecommunications sector in 2024, which it said was ‘fuelled by a surge in fibre subscriptions’.

Fast fibre internet continues to roll out across South Africa – and while it may have slowed temporarily, there seems to be no stopping it.

By Mark van Dijk
Images: Gallo/Getty Images