MTN in aggressive fibre push

MTN is promoting new fibre based broadband offerings to gain support from communities to roll out FTTH in their suburbs.

MTN first announced its intentions to launch FTTH services in April 2014, following successful FTTH trials conducted with residents of Monaghan Farm, a gated estate located 30km north of Johannesburg.

The group had hoped to commercially launch a 100Mbps FTTH service in South Africa by 1 June 2014, but missed the launch date. In the weeks that followed, MTN annouced it had connected its first commercial customers.

In a new drive for the service, MTN released its latest fibre-to-the-home broadband prices, with tariffs ranging between R794 per month and R1,389 per month.

MTN is offering speeds between 20Mbps and 100Mbps, and data packages ranging from 10GB to 500GB per month.

MTN also offers seamless upgrade and downgrade of speeds, and increasing or decreasing of a user’s data bundle size.

Aggressive take

South African operators and ISPs are in a new battle for fibre-to-the-home services, and the latest push from MTN is an aggressive one in a market that is still breaking ground on fibre.

Telkom will be targeting a number of suburbs in Gauteng, the Western Cape and Durban in its first wave of 100Mbps FTTH rollouts.

All these projects are set to be completed by the end of the year (31 December 2014), Telkom said.

Meanwhile, Vumatel has announced that it is planning to roll out fibre networks in 42 suburbs in certain parts of Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The first area which will get fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) products from Vumatel is Parkhurst in the north of Johannesburg.

Vumatel has already started with its site preparation for its core network, and broke ground at a ceremony near the Parkhurst Primary School on 25 August 2014.

Vodacom has stated that, while it has a FTTH strategy, the group’s first focus would be on fibre-to-the-business (FTTB), which it would then expand to homes. A big part of Vodacom’s fibre strategy also rests on the success of its acqusition of Neotel going through.

Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub, speaking to BusinessTech in May, said that the process to get fibre to the home would be a three-year plan – accelerated by the Neotel buyout.

“So we will do a couple of estates, gain some experience and so on. But effectively we will fast track it and do more next year (2015)…it’s definitely part of the three year programme,” Joosub said.

“I think what we need to do, is capture the fibre-to-the-business first, get some revenue, and get the business to be sustainable first.”

More on fibre

MTN fibre-to-the-home has arrived

Where you can get Telkom fibre to the home

Vodacom’s fibre-to-the-home blueprint

New fibre-to-the-home suburbs announced