10Gbps home fibre mystery

Vumatel has continued to keep the lid on its plans to roll out 10Gbps fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) services in South Africa, nearly four years after it initially aimed to launch the product.

The fibre network operator (FNO) first revealed it was testing 10Gbps FTTH in partnership with Internet service provider (ISP) Cool Ideas in March 2021.

Vumatel initially said it would launch the package after a four-week trial, but that did not materialise.

Just over a year later, Vumatel told MyBroadband the product was still under development. While it could not share any specific details, it said that testing was going well.

The company has since gone quiet on its plans for the package.

It is possible that Vumatel’s recent focus on providing FTTH to less affluent customers also saw the company shelving the package, at least for the time being.

Another possibility was that Vumatel realised that many households who could potentially take up the product would not have the necessary hardware to use the service at its peak capacity in any case.

Speed bottlenecks can occur along many points in the connection process, from the router or wireless access point to the LAN cable and the used device’s Ethernet port, wireless modem, CPU, and storage drive.

Cool Ideas co-owner Paul Butschi previously told MyBroadband that he has been using a 10Gbps Vumatel line in his home since mid-2021. The installation was done leading up to Vumatel’s planned commercial launch of the product.

Despite using an industrial-grade 36-core Mikrotik router with up to 16Gbps throughput, a CAT 6A cable, and a PC with a 10Gbps Ethernet port, 12-core AMD chip, 32GB RAM and an NVME SSD, his speed tests maxed out at about 4.3Gbps.

In addition, the maximum file download speed he could get was 2.22Gbps when using a multi-threaded download manager.

When MyBroadband tested a 10Gbps business fibre connection in 2019, our hard drive was too slow to write data at the rate at which it was being downloaded.

Launching 10Gbps fibre when most households would not have routers, computers, smart devices, or storage capable of supporting that speed comes with reputational risk.

Less tech-savvy customers may not be aware of the limits of their hardware and blame the company for excessive speed claims.

That being said, a lot has changed in terms of technology in the last few years.

Most flagship and mid-range smartphones now have Wi-Fi 6 support, which can theoretically handle up to 9.6Gbps throughput.

Several high-end laptops and desktop motherboards now also have 10Gbps Ethernet ports, and solid-state drives with much faster writing speeds than hard drives have become the standard for storage.

In many other countries around the world, FNOs have launched packages offering much higher speeds in the past few yars.

For example, Google Fiber launched an 8Gbps symmetrical package in the US in 2024.

Swiss operator Salt also offers a 10Gbps package, while several Japanese FNOs sell FTTH services with up to 10Gbps speeds.

1Gbps ceiling for 10 years

As it stands, the fastest speed generally available on a home fibre product in South Africa is 1Gbps, which supports downloading files at 125MB/s.

At its peak speed, such a connection would be able to download a 1GB file in eight seconds, a 4K movie in less than five minutes, and a 100GB video game in roughly 13 to 14 minutes.

Based on the customer data consumption figures among the most data-hungry FTTH users that ISPs have previously shared with MyBroadband, there may be demand for a 10Gbps product.

Vumatel was the first FNO to launch 1Gbps FTTH in South Africa.

It debuted the line speed alongside its 4Mbps, 50Mbps, and 100Mbps offerings in its first major development in Parkhurst in October 2014.

All but one of the country’s top five biggest FNOs now offer 1Gbps packages, while several smaller operators also sell 1Gbps lines as their top-end products.

The only odd one out among the larger operators is Openserve, which only sells 1Gbps packages as part of its premium end-to-end fibre-to-the-room product.

Below is a list of the major FNOs in South Africa that offer packages with 1Gbps download speeds on Afrihost, one of South Africa’s biggest and most well-known ISPs.