If you sell connectivity, you’ve felt it: the industry’s gravitational pull toward “cheaper, quicker, now”. On paper, it’s irresistible. In practice, it’s why so many end-customers complain about inconsistent performance, fragile last-mile setups, and delayed go-lives that stall entire projects.
We’re living through a paradox. We’re seeing historic growth in underlying digital infrastructure, yet experiencing recurring reliability pain where it actually matters: delivery to site, day-to-day stability, and the experience the client gets when they click “join meeting”.
Consider the macro picture first. South Africa’s data centre footprint and surrounding digital capacity are expanding fast, and traffic through local exchanges keeps climbing. Mordor Intelligence projects South Africa’s data centre market will continue growing through the decade, while its related server-market analysis notes NAPAfrica has already surpassed 5Tbps peak traffic − evidence that demand keeps compounding.
That’s great news, until the customer’s branch can’t get online reliably, or their cutover drags on for weeks. Growth without dependable access just magnifies frustration.
Reliability isn’t a “nice-to-have” anymore; it’s the baseline. And while fibre rollouts get most of the attention, the truth is that some wireless providers also struggle to meet market demands. Delays of four to eight weeks to bring a wireless service live are common. In today’s environment, where businesses measure success in hours and days rather than months, those timelines simply don’t cut it.
Elongated lead times are more than an annoyance; they’re a margin killer for resellers and a trust killer with enterprise clients.
When a site is dark, the entire services stack is dark: SD-WAN, voice, cloud security, observability, collaboration … none of it bills until the connectivity layer is up. That’s why elongated lead times are more than an annoyance; they’re a margin killer for resellers and a trust killer with enterprise clients.
Public guidance from South African ISPs and FNOs puts new fibre installations anywhere from a few weeks to multiple months depending on wayleaves, building access, and whether the building is already fully lit. Even when fibre is in the street, activation and internal build can push timelines far to the right.
And then there’s the randomness of the wider internet. In March 2024, multiple West African submarine cable breaks degraded connectivity across at least 11 to 13 countries, including South Africa, as capacity was rerouted and constrained.
Microsoft publicly confirmed the impact of concurrent West and East coast incidents. If the design was brittle – with no meaningful diversity, or no adequate failover, customers didn’t just see slower speed tests; they saw the difference between a resilient network and a marketing claim.
Add to that the creeping “race to the bottom”. It’s visible in markets beyond South Africa. In the UK, Ofcom’s quarterly complaints data consistently shows the service gulf between providers. Complaints cluster around faults, provisioning and billing, and these are the very areas that “lowest price” strategies tend to squeeze. Cut too deep on support and delivery, and reliability suffers in ways customers feel immediately. Providers can drop price once but they will pay for reputational damage for years.
So, what wins? Three things the market doesn’t celebrate loudly enough:
1) Clean architecture over cheap architecture
There’s a world of difference between engineered, licensed, predictable links and over-contended, unlicensed “make-do” radio. ICASA’s own materials (and industry submissions to the regulator) have long recognised the role of licensed microwave for enterprise-grade availability and quality of service.
Modern microwave capacities, especially in higher bands, aren’t the bottleneck they were a decade ago. The decision between fibre and microwave is often about presence, time and total cost of ownership, not the theoretical ceiling of the medium.
Where fibre is obstructed by wayleaves or build constraints, licensed microwave is a valid and trusted path to SLA-backed uptime, often measured in hours or days to live service rather than weeks to months.
2) Time-to-value beats time-to-quote
Procurement cycles have become a theatre of “send me your best price”. But if the customer’s go-live drifts by six or ten weeks, the cheaper quote is the costlier outcome. Publicly visible guidance from local operators shows just how variable lead times can be; in “connected” buildings you might see weeks, but in “on-net” builds still requiring in-building work, you could be staring at months.
That latency suppresses the ability to bill connectivity and every upstream service that depends on it. The providers that keep winning aren’t necessarily the cheapest; they’re the ones who can credibly close the time-to-value gap, then keep the lights on. Time-to-value isn’t just about speed. It’s about trust too.
Partners are judged not only on how fast they can connect a site, but on whether they can execute on the broader strategy that was sold to the customer in the first place. That’s often the harder part. Salespeople can only deliver on their promises if they have solid partners working in the background to turn that vision into reality. Without that trust, the deal collapses long after the ink has dried.
3) Resilience that’s real, not rhetorical
Cable cuts, municipal delays, access denials all happen. The question is whether the architecture fails soft or fails hard. After the 2024 cable incidents, networks with diverse paths and genuine failover degraded gracefully; others suffered complete or near-complete outages. If reselling into mid-market and enterprise, that outcome reflects on the provider, not on the upstream. Resilience isn’t a press-release word; it’s a design discipline.
What does this mean for reseller leadership and sales teams?
For executives:
Resist the urge to build P&L around perpetual discounting. Commodity price-plays invite commodity churn. There’s ample evidence that markets punish weak provisioning and support. Just look at the recurring complaint tables abroad.
The better bet is to institutionalise reliability as a commercial strategy: reward time-to-value, ring-fence delivery and support capacity, and contract for diversity where it matters (last-mile choices, upstream redundancy, or traffic engineering that accounts for regional cable events).
Reliability compounds; so does unreliability. And it’s not measured in isolated wins. It’s about consistency and being able to count on swift, efficient deployments across the entire implementation funnel, every time.
That consistency is what drives customer satisfaction, not just at the point of installation, but throughout the lifecycle of the relationship. It’s the difference between delivering a one-off success and building a reputation as a trusted, long-term partner.
For sales teams:
Sell the outcome, not just the access medium. When positioning connectivity as the backbone for everything the customer cares about (think security stacks, UC, observability, SASE, SaaS adoption), the conversation shifts from “Who’s R200 cheaper?” to “Who can make my project go live this month and stay live under stress?”
Bring real-world timeframes into the conversation. If local guidance says a new build could be four to eight weeks or even a few months, say it. Then show the resilience plan: what goes live first, how you fail over, and what “good” looks like under fault conditions. Customers don’t expect perfection; they expect honesty and a plan.
And there’s another angle worth considering: what happens after the fibre goes in. Those initial wireless links don’t disappear. They can be repurposed as high-availability failover connections. It’s a cost-effective way to safeguard uptime and avoid catastrophic service failures. Too often, customers only realise the value of redundancy after a painful outage. Building it in from the start turns a quick-win deployment into a long-term reliability story.
A final word on “dirty networks”. The phrase gets thrown around to describe oversubscribed, noisy environments where contention and unmanaged interference erode user experience. You can see the symptoms in social sentiment studies and forum threads, with questions around slow evenings, inexplicable jitter, support loops.
Labels aside, the fix is architectural: control the RF where you can, choose licensed where it’s warranted, right-size capacity, and design for path diversity. Wireless backhaul and licensed microwave have a durable role when engineered properly; fibre is fantastic, but the internet is not a monoculture.
The real opportunity lies in designing networks engineered in conjunction for high capacity and resilience. By structuring for high availability across both fibre and wireless, you’re not just relying on wireless backhauls. That’s the kind of backbone enterprises need if they want to avoid being let down when demand peaks.
Where we go from here
The next growth curve with AI adoption at the edge, richer collaboration, branch-to-cloud patterns and low-latency industrial workloads is upon us. It won’t reward the cheapest quotes. It will reward the partners who put reliability on a pedestal, tell the truth about timelines, and build in protection against the events we know will happen (from municipal wayleaves that stall fibre builds to subsea faults that strain international routes).
This is where flexibility matters. Salespeople need to know there are solutions that can bridge the gap. Get a customer live on reliable wireless within days, then transition them into fibre as soon as it’s ready, even under month-to-month contract terms. That blend of short-term responsiveness and long-term stability is how bottlenecks are turned into business momentum.
South Africa’s digital economy is expanding. Our job, as an ecosystem, is to make sure businesses can ride that wave with clean, resilient networks that turn ambition into uptime.
That’s how to win the long game: not with louder banners or lower tariffs, but with networks that quietly work, every day, under real-world conditions.
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