Openserve home fibre price hikes — Big ISPs detail changes

South Africa’s biggest fibre Internet service providers (ISPs) are implementing varying price hikes on Openserve fibre-to-the-home packages from April 2024 due to the fibre network operator’s upcoming wholesale price increases.

MyBroadband first became aware of the price adjustments after Axxess emailed customers its updated pricing on Friday.

Openserve would not share its precise wholesale fibre price hikes with MyBroadband, stating that this was confidential information only shared with its partner ISPs.

However, a source in the industry has told us that Openserve will be increasing its tariffs as follows:

• 50Mbps download speeds — +R50 (R57.50 including VAT)
• 100Mbps, 200Mbps, and 300Mbps download speeds — +R40 (R46 including VAT)
• 500Mbps downloads speed — +R30 (R34.50 including VAT)

These price changes don’t take into account additional bandwidth costs incurred by ISPs.

Therefore, if an ISP increases its prices by more than the wholesale hikes, it does not necessarily mean that the ISP has increased profit margins on those packages.

MyBroadband asked several prominent fibre ISPs how their consumer pricing would change due to Openserve’s increases, as most had not yet updated the prices on their websites.

In addition to having previously available information from Axxess, we sourced new prices from Afrihost, Cool Ideas, Vox, and Webafrica.

Major ISPs that did not share their updated pricing include Mweb, RSAWeb, and Telkom.

Most of the packages received price hikes between R40 and R70.

Webafrica remained the cheapest ISP on most packages, followed by Afrihost.

There is good news for some Afrihost customers on the higher-end packages, with the 300Mbps and 500Mbps products retaining their old prices.

Cool Ideas customers on the top-end 500Mbps package have received a discount of R70, despite Openserve increasing the price on this line by R34.50.

However, Cool Ideas is the most expensive option on all the other packages.

The table below summarises the changes in pricing on Openserve FTTH packages that MyBroadband was able to confirm by the time of publication.

Compounded hikes

Several FTTH customers on Afrihost, Mweb, and RSAWeb on MyBroadband’s forum also complained that their ISPs had already increased prices on their FTTH packages in 2024, before the Openserve hikes.

Afrihost’s price adjustments were rather complicated.

Customers who signed up for Openserve FTTH packages before 1 January 2024, initially paid R547 per month.

This was increased by R30 to R577 in March 2024.

Those who signed up between 1 January and 29 February 2024 have received an “override” price of R547.

New customers who sign up from 1 March 2024, will be paying R597 per month.