Telkom’s traditional business of fixed lines is not looking healthy. The number of fixed access lines in service has plummeted by 7% in the past year, to less than 3,1m, the company disclosed in its interim financial results on Tuesday.
At the same time, the aggressive roll-out of fibre broadband has not done much to increase the number of fixed broadband subscribers, with growth in the past year of just 0,3%. Telkom has just over a million such subscribers on its books.
Fixed-line voice usage and subscription revenue decreased by 4,4% to just under R7bn, from R7,3bn previously, driven by competition, mobile substitution, the 7% decline in the number of lines and customers migrating to lower-value bundled offerings, Telkom said.
It said fibre broadband remains a priority focus area, alongside mobile, which has performed well.
“Despite an intensely competitive market and operational challenges encountered as a result of industrial action in August, we have been able to improve our ability to roll out and connect our customers to their choice of broadband access,” it said.
“While we drive the fibre roll-out, we continue to see a market need for utilising our existing network, enabling access to Internet at the required speeds. To this end, we have seen an increase in ports activated via MSANs (multi-service access nodes) by 24,1% to approximately 1,3m homes passed.”
Fibre to the home increased to 144 512 homes passed. “The current connectivity rate is above 13% and growing steadily. We are confident that with our multiple deployment strategies and initiatives already underway, this number will continue to increase over the next 12 months.”
It said it now also has 42 000 fibre connections to business premises. “This allows us to provide multiple services with high-speed links to all major corporates in South Africa catering for their major site requirements as well as lower speed fibre-based metro Ethernet links for branch connectivity.” — (c) 2016 NewsCentral Media