Fibre war in South Africa — with prices starting at less than R300 per month

South Africans in select neighbourhoods have the option to get a cost-effective uncapped fibre-to-the-home package from as little as R297 per month.

Three of South Africa’s biggest fibre network operators offer specific fibre products at lower prices than their standard offerings available on their wider networks.

These packages seek to make fibre connectivity more affordable and accessible to areas that might not previously have been financially feasible targets for conventional fibre investment.

By strategically cutting costs in the rollout and delivery of the service, they can sell the packages at attractive prices in these locations.

Vumatel’s Vuma Reach is one example of such an offering.

The company first trialled the project in Mitchells Plain in 2019 to see if there was interest in fibre-to-the-home services in lower-income suburbs, with an option to pay for the service using prepaid tokens.

Following its enormous success, it was rolled out to Retreat, Vosloorus, Soweto, Tshwane (including Danville, Eersteerust, Lotus Gardens, Soshanguve), Grassy Park and Blue Downs.

Vuma Reach comes in two packages, with either 20Mbps or 40Mbps download speeds, both featuring 10Mbps upload speed.

These packages are resold by several ISPs, including Afrihost, MWEB, Cool Ideas, Vodacom, and Webafrica.

Telkom’s wholesale division Openserve provides an end-to-end broadband service called Web Connect sold exclusively by certain partner ISPs.

It also offers this product in two packages, one with a 10Mbps download speed and 5Mbps upload, and a faster option with 20/10Mbps speeds.

To save costs on installation and offer the packages at competitive prices, Openserve provisions a Wi-Fi-only ONT at the customer’s home, eliminating the need for a router or modem that is typically provided by the ISP.

In 2021, Frogfoot launched a similar offering with Frogfoot Air.

With this offering, it also installs Wi-Fi-0nly subscriber gateway at the customer’s home to help reduce costs.

Currently, about 40,000 homes fall within the Frogfoot Air coverage footprint, with the service being available in the following areas:

• Despatch
• King William’s Town
• Uitenhage
• Waverley
• Polokwane
• Tzaneen
• Oudtshoorn
• Franschoek
• Idas Valley
• Swellendam
• Caledon
• Sc0ttsville

These three offerings provide customers who cannot afford a high-end fibre package the option to have reliable and fast Internet access at home.

All three are available from one of the country’s biggest ISPs — Afrihost.

When it comes to pricing, the Frogfoot Air 10/1Mbps package was the cheapest, at R297.

However, the 20/2Mbps Frogfoot Air package was more expensive than both 20/10Mbps packages on Openserve Web Connect and Vuma Reach.

The table below compares the prices of Vuma Reach, Openserve Web Connect, and Frogfoot Air packages from Afrihost.

Now read: Fibre vs ADSL prices in 2022