Supersonic AirFibre missed the mark — why MTN is not giving up on it yet

Uptake of Supersonic’s AirFibre service was perhaps not as good as once hoped, but the ISP’s owner MTN says those who have signed up are satisfied with the product and what it has to offer.

Supersonic launched its AirFibre products over two years ago, promising to offer fibre-like connectivity at fair prices using proprietary fixed-wireless access (FWA) hardware from Tarana Wireless.

Many people had high expectations for the service when it launched, perhaps none more so than Supersonic managing director at the time, Calvin Collett.

Collett played an instrumental role in Supersonic’s growth into a major player in South Africa’s fibre ISP space. It was well-justified to believe he could do the same for FWA.

Collett told MyBroadband that the company was aiming for 60,000 AirFibre customers a year into availability.

That was after Supersonic had racked up over 15,000 expressions of interest in April 2021, about a month after Supersonic started teasing the service.

That grew to over 20,000 in early May 2021, when it started installing the hardware at customers’ homes.

However, due to the severe global chip shortage, it could only connect 100 customers by June 2021.

Collett left the company in December 2021, several months before the first anniversary of AirFibre’s launch.

Since then, Supersonic and MTN have remained quiet about the service’s growth.

Megan Nicholas took over from Collett in January 2022, resigning from her position in April 2023. She was replaced by Mweb’s former product, sales, and marketing general manager, Carolyn Holgate.

In recent feedback to MyBroadband, MTN confirmed that Supersonic’s AirFibre did not reach the ambitious customer target it had hoped for.

The telecoms operator said that changes in its strategy meant it diversified into other technology types, not just AirFibre.

Nevertheless, it maintained that AirFibre had shown “excellent” growth, although it could not share specific customer numbers because its parent was a listed company. 

This justification seems odd, however, as MTN always reports its mobile subscriber numbers in its quarterly, interim, and annual results.

MTN said that Supersonic was now nearing coverage of over five million homes in South Africa. For comparison, Rain covers over 7 million homes with fixed-5G services.

In both cases, these numbers refer to households that can sign up for the service but don’t necessarily do.

Since Supersonic launched Air Fibre, several mobile networks — including MTN itself — have rolled out uncapped 5G packages with prices that compare fairly well to fibre-to-the-home (FTTH).

For example, at the entry-level, MTN offers a 10Mbps Home Starter package that costs just R249, roughly half the price of a Supersonic AirFibre package with the same speed.

At the top end, Afrihost offers an MTN Pure 5G package with 100Mbps speeds for R849, as opposed to the R999 that the AirFibre package with the same speed costs.

MTN said both 5G and AirFibre offered a “fibre-like” Internet experience.

“5G and AirFibre have their own unique selling propositions and should be seen as alternative options for consumers,” the company said.

One advantage of AirFibre over 5G is that it does not suffer from the same congestion issues that mobile networks might during load-shedding.

“AirFibre is not impacted by the typical congestion experienced by mobile networks during load shedding, as the capacity is generally dedicated between the cell tower and the end user.

“This is also why AirFibre is positioned as an alternative to Fibre – the quality of the connection is consistent.”

Nevertheless, it is also at the mercy of MTN’s tower backup power infrastructure, so connectivity could be lost when the power goes out.

“The power is usually shared with the mobile equipment at the base station. Hence, if a base station eventually loses power, then the AirFibre service will be impacted,” MTN said.

MTN nonetheless regards AirFibre as a “super-reliable and super-fast” home broadband option that does not require the digging and trenching of true fibre products.

Prices versus 5G

In the table below, MyBroadband compared the prices of Supersonic’s AirFibre — which have remained unchanged since launch — to competing fixed-5G, FTTH, and FWA products.

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