Biggest fibre networks in South Africa

South Africa has eight major fibre network operators (FNOs) providing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity to roughly 2.4 million households.

MyBroadband recently asked the country’s top FNOs to share their latest homes passed and connected figures for an updated look at their rollouts and customer reach.

Fibre network expansions have slowed down significantly in the past year as middle-income and affluent suburbs became congested with FTTH availability.

CIVH-owned Vumatel has a commanding lead over the rest of the major players, most of whom have explained they will be focusing on improving connectivity uptake in areas where they have already rolled out.

Vumatel has passed over two million homes with FTTH, of which 827,558 had active connections.

Its biggest rival is Telkom’s Openserve, which had passed about 1.29 million households with its FTTH network by the end of September 2024. 640,730 of those properties had connections in

While the number is over three times greater than the next biggest FNO, it is nearly 400,000 less than the peak number of fixed customers that Telkom had in the heyday of ADSL connectivity.

Telkom was caught napping by Vumatel and failed to leverage its extensive network of existing trenches and infrastructure to ensure it could retain its lead in the fixed market.

It first started reporting FTTH customer numbers in March 2016, roughly a year and a half after Vumatel launched its pivotal Parkhurst project.

While catching up would have been a possibility at that stage, Telkom bounced back and forth between fixed and mobile investments under former CEO Sipho Maseko.

The company has recently refocused its strategy on leveraging existing assets — including its well-established fixed infrastructure — to maximise revenue.

The third-biggest FNO — Herotel — may have gone by largely unnoticed given its focus on smaller cities and towns.

At the end of 2024, Herotel had passed nearly 575,000 homes with FTTH, of which roughly 214,000 were actively connected customers.

Herotel is the only FNO in the country’s top 10 that operates a closed-access network, meaning it acts as infrastructure and Internet service provider (ISP).

MetroFibre is the third-biggest open-access FNO and the fourth-largest overall, with more than 510,000 homes passed and 172,000 connected.

Rounding off the top five is Frogfoot, with 406,000 homes passed and 169,000 connected, just 3,000 short of MetroFibre.

The three other biggest FNOs for FTTH are Octotel, Zoom Fibre, and Evotel.

It should be noted that Vodacom also has a substantial fibre network providing coverage to around 166,000 customers.

However, it counts both homes and businesses in that tally, so it would not be fair to include when looking specifically at FTTH coverage.

The table below summarises the latest number of homes passed and connected with FTTH connectivity in South Africa.

Just the tip of the iceberg

While the eight FNOs represent a substantial part of the total home fibre coverage, there are many more small and medium-sized operators covering millions more homes.

Accounting for some overlap — what the industry calls “overbuild” — the major network operators together cover roughly 5.5 million households.

According to the Open Access Network mapping project undertaken by the Internet Service Providers’ Association of South Africa (Ispa), roughly 10.4 million households in the country had access to at least one FNO by the end of 2023.

This implies that the dozens of smaller operators in South Africa have a combined coverage of roughly 5 million households.

Ispa’s FNO perception survey among its member ISPs includes 38 major operators.

Among the noteworthy players not among the top nine (when including Vodacom) are Cybersmart, TT Connect, Balwin Fibre, Link Africa, Link Layer, and Lightstruck.