Fibre smashes ADSL and uncapped fixed-5G in price shootout

Fibre is far more affordable than Telkom’s digital subscriber line (DSL) products, offering higher speeds often at a lower cost.

However, there is an argument for preferring DSL products over uncapped fixed-5G plans due to the fair usage policies (FUPs) implemented on fixed-wireless connections.

Telkom has lost roughly 920,000 DSL subscribers over the past decade, with its latest figures revealing that it has just 82,000 of these customers left.

This represents a decline of roughly 92% in about nine and a half years.

Reporting the latest official figure came as a surprise, as Telkom hadn’t shared DSL numbers since 2015.

The last officially confirmed number of DSL customers it had was 1,004,705 by 30 September 2015.

However, the decline is somewhat expected. Telkom has been actively migrating DSL customers to fibre in areas where it has fibre network coverage for several years.

“Over time, all copper-based services will eventually be migrated to fibre. Openserve will not switch off copper or disconnect DSL customers where we do not have fibre presence,” a Telkom spokesperson said in May 2022.

“We will only migrate copper customers to fibre where we have fibre.”

It is unclear how many of the DSL customer losses can be attributed to Telkom migrating them to fibre.

ADSL vs entry-level fibre and uncapped fixed-5G

MyBroadband compared pricing and speeds for entry-level fibre and uncapped fixed-5G plans to Telkom’s ADSL and VDSL products.

We used Afrihost as the Internet service provider for the fibre packages.

Zoom Fibre sells the most affordable product of all the FNOs listed. It sells its symmetrical 15Mbps fibre line for R247 through Afrihost.

While Zoom Fibre is a smaller FNO than Openserve and Vumatel and its availability is more limited, its fibre network has passed more homes than customers remaining on Telkom’s DSL network.

At R297 per month, Telkom’s 5Mbps ADSL and Frogfoot’s Air’s prepaid asymmetrical 10Mbps fibre packages are the next-most affordable.

While pricing is the same, the Frogfoot Air package offers double the download speed.

Openserve Web Connect — another prepaid fibre product — offers asymmetrical 20Mbps and 40Mbps for R329 and R389, respectively, through Afrihost.

However, Web Connect is not as readily available as Openserve’s other products, being limited primarily to lower-income suburbs.

DSL Internet packages might still be more attractive to some  South Africans than uncapped fixed-LTE or fixed-5G plans from MTN, Afrihost, or Telkom.

While these plans are technically uncapped, they are subject to FUPs, which throttle connection speeds once a certain consumption figure is met.

For example, the MTN Home Premium plan offers speeds up to 35Mbps until a threshold of 500GB. After that, speeds are throttled to 10Mbps. The product costs R499 per month.

However, MTN’s throttling isn’t as severe as that implemented on Telkom and Afrihost’s fixed-5G plans.

Afrihost’s Pure 5G 50Mbps plan offers speeds up to 50Mbps until 2TB of data is consumed. After that, it throttles speeds to just 2Mbps. These customers pay R749 per month.

Telkom’s fixed-5G FUP is slightly more complex. Its Telkom 5G Indoor Internet product offers speeds up to 50Mbps until 500GB, then it throttles speeds to 4Mbps for 50GB of data.

Once the 50GB has been consumed, speeds will be reduced to 2Mbps for the rest of the billing cycle. Telkom charges R979 per month for its fixed-5G plan.

Only one provider — Rain — doesn’t implement FUPs on its fixed-5G plans, making them truly uncapped.

The table below compares speeds and pricing for Telkom’s DSL packages, entry-level fibre, and entry-level uncapped fixed-5G products. Prepaid fibre products are marked with an asterisk.