South Africa's fixed-line infrastructure, compared with its neighbours and the world
Sources: ICASA 2025; Stats SA GHS 2024; ITU Facts and Figures 2024; OECD; World Bank; Teraco; Cable.co.uk 2024; A4AI. Details and caveats below.
Fixed-line telecoms in South Africa is two stories at once. The copper network that carried the country's phone calls for a century is being switched off, exchange by exchange. In its place, fibre has become the fastest-growing connection type in the country — and South Africa now has more subsea cable capacity, more data-centre space and a bigger internet exchange than any of its neighbours. But measured per person, fixed broadband still reaches only a small minority. This piece compares where South Africa stands against its neighbours and against the rest of the world.
Sources: ITU Facts and Figures 2024, ICASA State of the ICT Sector Report 2025, World Bank, OECD broadband statistics, operator and regulator reports. Where figures are derived, dated or conflict between sources, we say so.
Copper: the network being switched off
Telkom's copper network peaked at about 4.5 million lines in 2000. ICASA's latest count puts active fixed-voice subscriptions at about 1.35 million, and in the year to mid-2024 Telkom lost nearly a quarter of its fixed-access lines. Revenue follows: fixed-line call revenue fell 15.1% in 2024 and fixed-line subscription revenue 22.4%.
Cable theft accelerated the decline. Telkom began decommissioning copper exchanges in 2015 after losing more than R200 million a year to theft, and has since moved customers to fibre, fixed-LTE and wireless, closing the worst-hit rural and peri-urban exchanges first. There is no single national switch-off date — it is a rolling, exchange-by-exchange process still under way in 2026. Only 3.4% of households now have a working landline.
Fibre: doubling in a year
Fixed broadband subscriptions almost doubled in 2024, from 1.4 million to 2.7 million. Nearly all of the growth was fibre to the home or building, which rose from 1.49 million to 2.47 million. DSL over copper kept shrinking, to about 242,000.
| Fibre network | Homes passed | Homes connected |
|---|---|---|
| Vumatel (Maziv) | 2.04m | — |
| Openserve (Telkom) | 1.5m | 786,000 |
| Herotel | 606,000 | 274,000 |
| MetroFibre | 515,000 | 175,000 |
| Frogfoot | 446,000 | 187,000 |
| Octotel | 400,000 | 135,000 |
The catch is take-up. Roughly half of the homes that fibre passes do not buy a connection, and only about 17% of households have fixed broadband at home, while 82% get online through mobile. Fixed-wireless operators such as Rain aim at the gap: areas where trenching fibre does not pay.
The backbone: cables, data centres and exchange points
| Layer | What South Africa has |
|---|---|
| Subsea cables | Nine international systems land here: WACS, SAT-3/WASC, SAFE, SEACOM, EASSy, METISS, ACE, Equiano and 2Africa. 2Africa (45,000km, the world's longest) is designed for up to 180Tbit/s and Google's Equiano for 144Tbit/s — against 340Gbit/s on the original SAT-3. |
| National long-haul fibre | Broadband Infraco (~15,000km, all nine provinces), Dark Fibre Africa / Maziv (~15,000km), Liquid Intelligent Technologies (50,000km+ across Africa), plus Telkom/Openserve's own network. |
| Internet exchange | NAPAfrica, in Teraco's Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban data centres, is Africa's largest exchange point: 652 peers and traffic above 5Tbit/s in 2025. |
| Public Wi-Fi (SA Connect) | About 751,000 households connected through ~4,400 hotspots by April 2024; the plan targets 5.57 million households via 32,000 hotspots. |
South Africa against its neighbours
Measured per person, fixed broadband is thin across the whole region — and South Africa is at the front of a slow pack.
Fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 people
Bars scaled to 40 per 100. Sources: World Bank/ITU; South Africa derived from ICASA's 2.7m subscriptions over Stats SA's mid-2024 population; Eswatini from 29,784 subscriptions over ~1.2m people. The latest official ITU figure for South Africa is 2.2 (2020).
| Country | Fixed broadband | Median fixed speed* | What stands out |
|---|---|---|---|
| South Africa | 2.7m subs; fibre 2.47m | ~50 Mbit/s | Nine subsea cables; open-access fibre market; copper being retired |
| Botswana | ~144,000 subs (2024) | ~42 Mbit/s | State wholesaler BoFiNet; reaches the sea via Namibia (Trans-Kalahari fibre to WACS) |
| Mozambique | ~49,000 subs (low confidence) | ~39 Mbit/s | Coastal, with its own cable landings; very low fixed take-up |
| Zimbabwe | ~418,000 subs (2026) | ~33 Mbit/s | Over half of fixed connections are now wireless or satellite; Starlink has overtaken TelOne ADSL |
| Namibia | ~104,000 subs | ~16 Mbit/s | Telecom Namibia's fixed lines fell from 193,000 to 86,000 (2017–22) while fibre grew from 252 to 17,000 |
| Eswatini | ~30,000 subs | — | 21 ISPs licensed in 2023; Starlink licensed |
| Lesotho | No reliable figure | — | Landlocked within South Africa; likely transits South African routes |
The regional pattern is clear. Where fibre investment is light, fixed connectivity is going wireless — fixed-LTE, 5G and increasingly low-earth-orbit satellite. Zimbabwe is the sharpest example. South Africa's difference is scale: competing open-access fibre networks, most of the region's subsea capacity, and the data centres where content is served locally.
South Africa against the world
| Benchmark | Fixed broadband per 100 | Fibre share |
|---|---|---|
| France | 47.5 | — |
| South Korea | 47.3 | ~90% |
| Switzerland | 46.8 | — |
| High-income countries (ITU) | ~38 | — |
| OECD average | 36.5 | ~45% |
| Singapore | 27.4 | ~75% of households |
| World average (ITU) | ~18 | — |
| China | 660m subs | 95%+ fibre |
| South Africa | ~4.3 | ~91% of fixed broadband |
| Africa average | <1 | — |
Two things stand out. First, the gap in reach is large: the world averages about four times South Africa's fixed broadband per person, and rich countries nearly nine times. Second, the quality of what South Africa does have is world-class. About nine in ten fixed broadband connections are fibre — far above the OECD average of about 45%, and in the same range as Korea and Spain — because the country largely skipped from copper straight to fibre rather than upgrading copper along the way.
Price and affordability are the brake. Cable.co.uk's 2024 study put South Africa's average fixed package at about US$48 (R875) a month, 113th of 219 countries and cheaper than the sub-Saharan average of US$63. But the Alliance for Affordable Internet finds that a basic connectivity basket costs the poorest fifth of South Africans about 12% of their income, against a 2% target.
What this means for businesses
- Plan for copper to disappear. If any site still runs on a Telkom copper line or ADSL, the question is when, not whether. Moving the numbers to cloud telephony and the line to fibre or fixed-LTE removes the risk.
- Where fibre is available, it is world-class. Business fibre in South African metros matches international standards, and local data centres keep latency low.
- Outside the fibre footprint, go wireless. Fixed-LTE, 5G and satellite now carry a growing share of fixed connections across the region.
- Expanding into neighbouring countries? Expect less fibre, more wireless, and connectivity that often depends on South African or Namibian routes to reach the sea.
Telecloud supplies fibre, fixed-LTE and cloud telephony for businesses moving off copper. Talk to us about the options at your address.