South Africa still has several million homes that remain unserved by fibre or other high-speed fixed access connectivity services. While the country is anticipating significant expansion over the next four to five years – Africa Analysis predicts that the fixed broadband market will include more than nine million homes by 2030 – there are still millions of people for whom connectivity remains elusive. They sit on the wrong side of meaningful connectivity despite the increase in fibre backbones and mobile coverage across South Africa.
ICASA’s State of the ICT Sector Report shows that only 14.5% of homes have fixed internet access even though there has been extensive urban fibre expansion. The same report has also found that there are disparities across provinces, with the Western Cape at 40.1% while Mpumalanga is only at 3.1%. Conventional fibre rollouts are concentrating their efforts in areas that are considered advantaged as opposed to lower-income communities.
One of the primary reasons why this expansion remains inhibited comes down to affordability and access. Fibre needs to be affordable on terms that resonate with customers whose income patterns differ significantly from traditional salaried households. Areas that have low household incomes or irregular cash flows are prioritising their basic needs before they are even thinking about connectivity. Meaningful connectivity has long been an important discussion point because it underscores how significantly intermittent access, or mobile-only access, affects homes and their ability to use the internet in ways that can support their businesses, work and education.
Pricing flexibility is key to bringing people into the networks and expanding their potential as entrepreneurs, students and employees. When people are connected, they are given the keys to the world and the opportunity to open doors that were previously closed.
Connecting people in previously disadvantaged communities or traditionally excluded areas is also an education issue. People need to understand what the infrastructure is doing for them and how they can use it to their advantage. Traditional fibre installations have often gone ahead without including the communities that will rely on them, so successfully including these communities comes down to establishing trust and providing insights. When people understand what fibre can do for their futures, then they are more likely to benefit from its potential. Companies that spend time in these communities before they put money in the ground are less likely to stall.
And the value of this approach? There’s a growing number of community stories that prove the value of prioritising people in fibre development. A landlord in Southfield, Cape Town, runs a rental property plot with multiple units of accommodation. When he was taught how a router works and how many devices it can support, he built a business model around it. In most of the shacks on his property, the residents had one mobile device. So he divided his monthly subscription fee of R265 across his tenants and added R35 to their rent. The result is that every person on his property had access to fibre while paying a fraction of the price of a full line and without battling the traditional issues that impact connectivity for people who live in shacks. These are often built from metal that creates a Faraday cage effect, disrupting wireless signals and forcing residents to hold their devices at odd angles to get a bar of mobile data. Fibre penetrates that environment without the interference, and the change felt by the residents is immediate. It also turns new subscribers into advocates.
For the fibre provider, this level of ingenuity delivers better customer retention across a base that will always be there monthly at a price that they can afford. Instead of trying to push individual connectivity across all the shacks, the connection is shared, but the value remains consistent.
The Southfield landlord understood the value because it was explained to him, and then he became the person who shared that across everyone on his plot. This chain of understanding from rollout team to landlords to tenants produces retention, organic growth and community relationships. Operators need to change their perspectives to maximise connections within existing coverage areas by choosing education and more flexible forms of access.
In the beginning, fibre success was defined by speed; now it is defined by the lived value it delivers to people in areas that need connectivity to thrive but face ongoing financial stability challenges. When ingenuity and flexibility combine, it is entirely possible to change the story behind South Africa’s connectivity challenge and potentially connect the millions of people who still go without it.
- Sandile Mkhwanazi, Head of Community Relations at Frogfoot RISE
