TC|Daily | Vumatel’s audacious plan to take fibre to everyone

The leadership teams at Vumatel and Vuma parent Maziv don’t dream small.

The company, South Africa’s largest provider of fibre-to-the-home broadband infrastructure, has an audacious plan to deploy fibre not only to townships — a project that is already well under way — but even to informal settlements.

It doesn’t intend doing this via wireless for the “last mile”. It wants to deploy a fixed-fibre connection into every house and into every dwelling, even if the household’s total income is less than R5 000/month!

It wants to drive down the price of uncapped broadband to less than R100/month, and in so doing make uncapped Internet access available to almost everybody in South Africa who wants it.

Pie in the sky? No, says Dietlof Mare, CEO of Vumatel and Maziv, in this wide-ranging interview with Duncan McLeod on TechCentral’s TC|Daily. The team is working hard to perfect the model and is confident it will be able to do it — and profitably, too.

In this episode of TC|Daily, Mare talks about the success of the Vuma Reach prepaid fibre roll-out in Mitchells Plain in Cape Town, and how Vumatel is replicating that model across the country, including in sprawling townships like Soweto, Vosloorus and Soshanguve in Gauteng.

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He also unpacks Vuma Key, Vumatel’s plan — now in pilot phase — to bring uncapped fibre Internet to places like Alexandra in Johannesburg and Khayelitsha in Cape Town.

Also in the interview, Mare talks about:

• The creation of Maziv, the new holding company of Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa, and why it was formed;
• The latest on the Vodacom acquisition of a significant minority stake in Maziv and what the operator brings to the table;
• Consolidation in the fibre network operator market in South Africa, and why the big mobile operators are going to play a leading role in this; and
• The importance of open access.

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