South Africa’s biggest home fibre network operator, Vumatel, says it has now passed two million households with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity.

Vumatel’s parent company Maziv says that one million of the homes were passed within the last three and a half years. News website MyBroadband reports that the latest rollouts were targeted specifically at underserviced, lower-income areas.

Vumatel’s network now consists of over 50,000 kilometres of fibre. The network of its sister company, Dark Fibre Africa, now measures 15,000 kilometres.

Vumatel first started rolling out fibre to the home in Johannesburg, in 2014. Today, it has overtaken its main rival in the FTTH market — Telkom’s Openserve, which had passed just over 1.1 million homes by June 2023.

However, Openserve could point out that homes passed with fibre do not equal homes connected – and that it has a higher level of connectivity rates, connecting nearly one out of every two houses that it has passed. The last available figures relating to Vumatel’s connectivity rate, from late last year, suggest that roughly one out of every three houses with access to Vumatel’s network choose to use it.

As readers will know, Vumatel was recently a target of service provider Vodacom, whose plans to buy South Africa’s largest FTTH network operator, and Dark Fibre Africa, which provides fibre services in the country’s cities, have been blocked by South Africa’s Competition Commission. It seems unlikely that Vodacom will give up on these plans just yet.