Vumatel has crossed one million fibre subscribers. It’s a hugely significant milestone for the Maziv-owned operator, but the number matters less for what it says about one company than for what it reveals about the transformative power of competition in South Africa’s telecommunications sector.

To appreciate just how far we’ve come, consider the comparison with ADSL. Telkom launched its first commercial ADSL service in August 2002. It took roughly 13 years – until about 2015 – for the former state-owned monopoly to reach a peak of just over a million ADSL subscribers. Vumatel, which laid its first fibre cables in the Johannesburg suburb of Parkhurst in 2014, reached the same number in about a decade – and it did so delivering vastly superior speeds, reliability and value.

It also killed ADSL, the technology that once defined fixed broadband in South Africa.

For years, Telkom’s instinct was to defend its legacy copper network. ADSL generated reliable annuity revenue – the monthly line rental alone from a million subscribers was worth close to R200-million/month. It was a comfortable business, and Telkom was slow to cannibalise it.

But the arrival of open-access fibre networks from Vumatel (and later, Frogfoot, Octotel, MetroFibre and others) – none of which needed Telkom’s permission or infrastructure – forced the incumbent’s hand.

Telkom eventually pivoted, launching Openserve as a standalone wholesale fibre business, but it had already ceded the initiative to a large extent. Today Openserve is the second-largest fibre-to-the-home operator in the country, behind Vumatel. If it had moved faster, it could have been the market leader. Then again, the shift would not have happened without competitive pressure.

Rent extraction

This is a pattern that repeats across sectors where state-protected monopolies are eventually exposed to market forces. Under its exclusive fixed-line concession, which ran until the mid-noughties, Telkom had every incentive to extract maximum rent from its copper network and very little incentive to invest in next-generation infrastructure at pace.

The result was years of expensive, capped, sluggish ADSL while the rest of the world moved on. It was only when government began – belatedly and imperfectly – to liberalise the market that private capital flowed in and things started to change.

Read: Vumatel tops a million subscribers in SA broadband milestone

The fibre industry that exists today in South Africa is almost entirely a creation of the private sector. No government programme built it. No state subsidy funded it. Entrepreneurs and investors saw an opportunity, took the risk, and built networks that now pass millions of homes.

South Africa’s total fibre-to-the-home subscriber base surged from about 1.5 million in 2023 to nearly 2.5 million in 2024 – a pace of adoption that would have been unthinkable under the old dispensation. That kind of growth is driven by competition, not central planning by a state company.

Vumatel is deploying fibre in townships like Alexandra in Johannesburg

But the most exciting chapter is still being written: the push into townships and underserved communities. For most of fibre’s short history in South Africa, the roll-out was concentrated in affluent suburbs. That’s now changing rapidly. Half of the homes on Vumatel’s network are now in traditionally underserved areas, including Soweto, Khayelitsha and Umlazi. Its Vuma Key product, launched in 2024, targets households earning less than R5 000/month.

Smaller, nimbler players are pushing the frontier even further. Companies like Fibertime and Wire-Wire Networks have built entire business models around delivering uncapped fibre at prices that compete with mobile data – R5/day in some cases, sold through prepaid vouchers rather than monthly contracts. It’s the same model that allowed mobile telephony to reach the mass market in the 2000s, and early indications are it’s working.

This is not charity. These are private companies chasing volume at thin margins in the expectation that demand for quality, uncapped connectivity is just as strong in Tembisa or Alexandra as it is in Sandton. Early signs suggest they’re right. And as I’ve written recently, they’re arguably doing more to bridge the digital divide than three decades of government policy has managed.

The lesson is clear: Telkom’s decades-long monopoly never achieved what a competitive market is achieving now. It took a state-protected incumbent 13 years to reach a million ADSL customers – and even then, service was capped, unreliable and overpriced. A competitive fibre market has matched that milestone while simultaneously extending connectivity into communities that Telkom’s copper network never reached and never would have.