While Telkom’s mobile business is a picture of good health, its fixed-line operation is looking sickly.

The number of fixed access lines in service has fallen by almost 10% in the 12 months to 30 September 2018, from 2.84 million to 2.57 million. Fixed broadband subscribers, including fibre and copper customers, declined by 2.5% to 974 000.

Fixed-line voice average revenue per user (Arpu) declined by 1.6% to R359.09, while fixed broadband Arpu rose by 3.4% to R194.42.

Total fixed-line voice traffic fell 12.7% to 5.6 billion minutes. Fixed service revenue fell 7%.

Fixed-line data revenue was flat at R4.9-billion. Fixed data connectivity services increased 0.9% to R3.4-billion due to a decline in traditional revenue streams, offset by the increase in fibre and new data products including fibre to the home and metro Ethernet.

There was a bright spot, however. Fibre to the home showed good growth, with subscribers rising by 30.8% to 393 000. The fibre attachment rate (the number of subscribers who take up fibre services where they’re available) rose from 24.5% to 35.6%.

Capital spending on fibre to the home was rationalised to bring up the attachment rate, falling 49.2% year on year to R598-million.

Consumption of fixed broadband data continued to rise, climbing 25.1% to 488 petabytes.

‘Migrating’

“We have instituted specific initiatives to counter the decline in the fixed business, such as innovative fixed-broadband products (led by the Unlimited product suite as well as customer speed upgrade migrations) and content offerings. In addition, we have begun migrating selected traditional fixed-line customers to wireless technologies,” Telkom said.

Openserve, which is responsible for building and maintaining Telkom’s core, fixed and mobile networks, will continue to promote next-generation fibre and Ethernet products, despite a decline in voice revenue.

“We are committed to modernising and commercialising the network and continue to drive the migration of legacy products to next generation fibre-based products. In line with the strategy, we have announced a minimum fibre-to-the-home speed offering starting at 10Mbit/s, effective from January 2019.”

Openserve revenue increased 0.9% to R8.7-billion, mainly driven by growth in fibre to the business.

“Across the fibre ecosystem, we see steady growth and have continued our journey to provide value-based pricing to our clients. In this endeavour, we will introduce increased bandwidth and optimise pricing to stimulate further connectivity growth.”