South Africa has a new player chasing the township fibre broadband market: Wire-Wire Networks has deployed fibre to 15 800 homes in Thembisa (previously Tembisa), a sprawling township in central Gauteng.

CEO JP Schmidtke joined the TechCentral Show earlier this week to share exclusive details about the company’s growth plans and to talk about the business opportunity for fibre companies in South Africa’s vast township economy.

Schmidtke said Wire-Wire Networks – like other industry players such as Vumatel, Fibertime and Frogfoot – believes townships present the next big expansion opportunity for fibre network operators, though the business model is rather different to the one used to deploy infrastructure in the suburbs.

Wire-Wire is offering uncapped fibre – delivered over a meshed Wi-Fi network from fibre endpoints in each home or dwelling, starting at R5 for an hour of uncapped internet access at 100Mbit/s (limited to a single device). Other price plans, which are all uncapped and offer 100Mbit/s, include:

• R9 for a one-day plan that connects one device

• R39 for a one-week plan that connects one device

• R119 for a one-month plan that connects one device

• R449 for a one-month plan that supports eight devices

• R1 120 for a one-month plan that supports 12 devices

Subscribers can connect anywhere in Thembisa where Wire-Wire has coverage and so are not confined to connecting to the network in the vicinity of their own homes.

There are no contracts or connection charges, and Wire-Wire provides a “free-to-use” Wi-Fi router and UPS (designed to keep the internet working even during load shedding and other power outages). The fibre is trenched, not delivered aerially, as it the case in many township deployments.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, Schmidtke unpacks how Wire-Wire was formed, talks about its future plans and explains how it hopes to make low-cost fibre broadband profitable in township settings.

Wire-Wire’s leadership team consists of Schmidtke as well as fibre industry expert Hendrik Opperman, head of projects (external) Succeed Bvuma, head of technical David Radebe and head of projects (internal) Susan Hattingh.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral