Frogfoot plans to keep buying small fibre network operators in South Africa’s affluent suburbs and expects larger networks to come up for sale in the next few years, CEO Shane Chorley told the TechCentral Show.
Chorley said acquisitions of small fibre network operators (FNOs) in the “leafy suburbs” were another key part of Frogfoot’s strategy. “We have done a couple of those already and we’ll continue to do that.”
Most of those deals involve networks of fewer than 10 000 homes. Chorley said he expects slightly bigger operators to be sold in the next few years. “And then in time, there might be a much bigger consolidation of one or two of the bigger ones.”
Frogfoot, internet service provider Vox and prepaid fibre brand Hypa raised new equity and expanded their debt facilities in August in a deal valuing the businesses at R14.4-billion. Most of that capital is going into townships, where Frogfoot wants to lift its build rate from about 80 000 connections a year to 360 000. Chorley said at the time that consolidation would not reach the lower-income market while there was still greenfield building to do.
In the suburbs, though, he expects it to continue. Octotel and MetroFibre Networx, which share a common investor in African Infrastructure Investment Managers (AIIM), are assessing a merger, TechCentral first reported earlier this month. “I think we should see a consolidation in the leafy suburb FNO space continue. And we want to participate in that.”
Asked whether Frogfoot would rather buy or be bought, Chorley said he would “be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer”. But the goal is growth. “I would hope to say that we will be the acquirer rather than being sold.” In August, he said Frogfoot wanted to build “a monster of a telco” rather than sell itself to MTN or another big suitor.
‘Unlikely to be absorbed’
Abraham van der Merwe, who leads Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa, said consolidation was inevitable in an infrastructure business. “Infrastructure requires scale, so that always leads to consolidation.” But Frogfoot was unlikely to be absorbed any time soon, he said, because its mission is to grow organically and its investors, management included, are patient and want to own the business “for a very long time”.
Van der Merwe said the group has no plans to follow Herotel, which in July signed a deal to distribute Amazon Leo low-Earth orbit satellite broadband in South Africa under the Evry brand from 2027.
“Do we see ourselves participating in that right now? Probably not,” he said. The group prefers to own its infrastructure, and its mission is to connect dense township areas, which “requires a different kind of technology”.
Low-Earth orbit services make sense in sparsely populated places, from farms to game lodges, where fibre will never be economical, Van der Merwe said. But each satellite serves a large footprint, so throughput drops as the number of users in that area grows. “If you have a terminal on every home in a township going to use that same satellite, then the throughput is just going to be really poor.”
For Herotel, which he noted was built by consolidating fixed-wireless operators and still has a large fixed-wireless base, investing in Leo makes “100% sense”. But he said he doesn’t see satellite “as a major threat for fibre networks in dense areas”, pointing out that the ground stations that relay satellite signals also need fibre.
He made a similar argument about 5G fixed-wireless networks such as the one Comsol is building. Comsol is a Frogfoot customer. “If you take the latest 5G base station and you say that’s the size of a golf ball, then the fibre that we deploy into each home is roughly the size of the sun.”
The TechCentral Show podcast interview with Chorley and Van der Merwe will be published next week. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
