Goodbye ADSL — Fibre vs copper prices in South Africa

South Africa’s fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) packages are generally cheaper than DSL broadband products with similar download speeds, a comparison by MyBroadband has found.

The sole provider of DSL infrastructure in South Africa — Telkom’s Openserve fixed-line division — has been bleeding DSL customers since 2016.

Of Telkom’s over 1 million peak DSL subscribers in March 2016, the company had fewer than 120,000 left by the end of September 2022.

Telkom’s last-ditch attempt to breathe new life into DSL by dropping the standard requirement to have a voice line with Telkom in April 2020 seemingly did nothing to stem the tide.

Openserve’s substantial growth in the FTTH market — thanks to extensive rollouts in recent years — has also not been enough to absorb that loss, with Telkom losing around half its fixed broadband subscribers over the same period.

Rival fibre network operators (FNOs), like Vumatel, Frogfoot, and MetroFibre, have also grown their fibre footprints, moving into areas where DSL was entrenched or places that never had fixed-line connectivity.

While fibre Internet has been in South Africa since 2007, FTTH rollouts only picked up steam in 2014 after Vumatel disrupted the market.

In roughly eight years, over 1.4 million homes have been connected with fibre across eight of the biggest networks in South Africa.

It took Telkom 13 years to get 1 million DSL customers.

As of September 2022, Openserve had 443,469 homes connected to its FTTH network.

The reason for FTTH’s rapid adoption is clear — it is the fastest and most reliable form of home broadband.

The optic fibre cables that support communication over FTTH networks are capable of much greater speeds and bandwidth than copper-based DSL.

They also have almost no secondhand value for criminals, which means cables are not targeted for theft.

In recent years, FTTH prices have also come down substantially as FNOs work to connect more subscribers to help them recoup their network investment costs and turn a profit.

We compared the pricing of DSL and FTTH packages from three major Internet service providers (ISPs) that offer both options.

For the FTTH pricing, we used products on Openserve’s network for a like-for-like comparison.

The cheapest DSL packages in South Africa have download speeds of 5Mbps. That is no longer an option with FTTH packages.

Most fibre networks now have an entry-level download speed of 20Mbps or greater, although some still offer 10Mbps products for specific low-income markets.

The cheapest package overall was a 5Mbps Axxess Just DSL Uncapped product for R295 per month.

But for R4 more, a lucky few can get a fibre package with double the download speed from Axxess or Mweb on the Openserve Web Connect network.

Web Connect is a product specifically aimed at high-density, low-income areas.

The most affordable DSL package with a 10Mbps download speed was available from Axxess at R395 per month.

Moving up to 20Mbps does not see DSL performing much better.

All the Openserve FTTH packages with 20-25Mbps download speeds from the three ISPs in our comparison were cheaper than the DSL options.

50Mbps was the closest fibre speed available on Openserve’s network to compare with the fastest DSL package you can get, which has a 40Mbps download speed.

For these packages, we found the pricing to be very similar, but all the fibre products offered a better price per Mbps.

The table below compares the prices of ADSL and FTTH packages with similar speeds from Afrihost, Axxess, and Mweb.

We’ve included the pricing for 5Mbps DSL packages, even though there weren’t suitable fibre packages with which to compare them.

Now read: Frogfoot’s fibre plans for 2023 — including a possible international expansion