Why Telkom is pouring capex into IT - Serame Taukobong — Telkom Group CEO Serame Taukobong

Telkom customers who want to buy fibre, mobile and a fixed-wireless product in a single purchase still can’t do so easily – a shortcoming group CEO Serame Taukobong has acknowledged is the central problem a multi-year overhaul of the operator’s back-office systems is meant to solve.

“If you walked into our shop and tried to buy fibre, five mobile devices and an LTE proposition, it’s quite a difficult transaction because it sits on three or four different ecosystems,” Taukobong told TechCentral on Tuesday in an interview after the release of Telkom’s results for the year ended 31 March 2026.

The fix is a large upgrade of Telkom’s operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) – the platforms that handle everything from provisioning to billing – which Taukobong said was the first overhaul of its kind on the mobile side “certainly since I’ve been here”.

The goal is to let Telkom sell a fully converged bundle at a single customer touchpoint, spanning both its Openserve wholesale arm and its consumer business, rather than stitching a sale together across separate platforms.

“It’s about automation and digitising the business,” he said, describing the migration as central to the group’s “OneTelkom” strategy of presenting one converged proposition to the customer. Asked whether the project should also lift average revenue per user (Arpu), Taukobong said: “That’s the key thing for us. Absolutely.”

Mixed spending picture

The drive helps explain an unusual feature of Telkom’s FY2026 capital spending. Group capital expenditure rose 10.4%, or R607-million, to R6.43-billion – but almost the entire increase went into back-office IT rather than the network. Spending on IT solutions, which Telkom ties to the BSS transformation, more than tripled to R952-million, while mobile capex slipped 3.5% to R2.69-billion and spending on network rehabilitation and sustainment was slashed 92.2% to just R26-million.

That IT spend is set to remain elevated. Taukobong said the OSS/BSS programme is “a two- to three-year project, so we’ll see that increasing in the next two to three years” – signalling elevated IT capital expenditure well beyond the year just reported.

Read: Telkom lifts dividend 66% as it slashes debt

Telkom’s audited statements point to a network catch-up to come, too: authorised capital expenditure not yet contracted jumped to R8.54-billion from R3.91-billion, which the company attributes to a much higher budget aimed at improving network infrastructure.

Taukobong called the capital allocation decisions “a continued balance”. As the mobile network expands to carry a growing prepaid base, he said, Telkom builds “headroom” to protect network speeds, while the same expansion lowers the roaming costs it pays rival operators.

Fixed-mobile convergence – bundling fibre, mobile and fixed-wireless on one account – is increasingly how operators defend Arpu and curb churn as voice, and eventually data, revenues commoditise. Telkom is unusual among local operators in owning both a large fixed and fibre footprint through Openserve and a fast-growing mobile arm, yet it has struggled to package the two as one.