A few months after being part of the largest fibre merger in South Africa’s history, Vumatel has crossed the 1-million customer mark.
The milestone further cements the company’s position as the largest provider of fibre internet connectivity to homes in the country.
The company has also reached this milestone with a smaller trove of fibre assets compared with rival Telkom, the largest network operator in South Africa, showing that its early entry into the home market was a fruitful exercise.
The company highlighted that most of its recent growth has come from traditionally underserved areas such as townships and rural towns, which fall outside the typical fibre target market.
“Initially, much of our subscriber growth came from traditional core metro areas and established suburbs within Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal,” said fibre group Maziv CEO Dietlof Maré.
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen strong growth from our rollout into Reach areas, providing much-needed uncapped, unrestricted broadband to previously underserved communities. This milestone reflects both depth in mature areas and increasing momentum across our broader footprint.”
Across the world, and most notably in Africa, rural and remote areas have tended to have low network coverage levels as telecom operators have avoided investing because of the expense involved. Providers would rather invest in towns and cities with big populations who are major consumers of communications services.
With fibre operators having saturated many higher-income areas, companies have had to turn their attention to the underserved market, which is what Vuma has done with its Reach platform.
Vuma is part of Remgro’s Maziv, which also houses fellow infrastructure providers Dark Fibre Africa, SADV, Rise Telecoms, BritelinkMCT and Herotel.
The fibre operator’s push to 1-million customers was achieved in about eight years.
According to the company, this represents “a significantly faster adoption curve than previous fixed-line technologies in South Africa”. For comparison, ADSL — the old technology associated with fixed telephone lines — took about 14 years to reach its peak of just over 1-million subscribers.
“The milestone underscores how central fibre connectivity has become to everyday life and economic participation,” said Vuma.
The milestone is another notch in the belt in a busy period for the group.
In November, Maziv’s R13bn merger with Vodacom’s fibre unit received Icasa’s final approval after a four-year battle, unlocking the opportunity to accelerate fibre deployment and expand access to high-quality connectivity, particularly in historically underserved communities.
In December, the Competition Tribunal approved Vumatel’s move to take full ownership of internet provider Herotel, with conditions to address competition and public interest-related concerns.
Founded in 2014, Herotel has passed more than 150,000 homes and business users across more than 400 towns and cities.
“Homes passed” is a measure used in the fibre industry to denote the number of potential customers a company has access to through its service being available in an area.
Herotel, which operates at the last-mile level, offering retail internet access services and fixed wireless access, becomes part of Maziv.
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