South Africa’s connectivity sector faces a familiar contradiction: unprecedented investment in digital infrastructure on one hand, and persistent frustration at the edge of the network on the other.
Data centres are expanding, mobile and broadband traffic continues to rise, and yet businesses across the country still struggle with delays, instability and uncertainty when it comes to getting reliably connected.
Many continue to rely on a single access medium to keep operations running, underestimating the revenue at risk when that connectivity fails.
Compounding this, organisations are encountering slower activation cycles as fibre network operators work through build and activation backlogs following network freezes.
This gap between macro-level growth and on-the-ground experience is where the real conversation needs to happen.
Growth is real but access remains uneven
There is no denying the momentum in South Africa’s digital ecosystem. The local data centre market is expected to continue growing strongly through the decade, driven by cloud adoption, content delivery and enterprise digitisation.
Public traffic statistics from NAPAfrica show peak traffic exceeding 5Tbps − clear evidence that demand for bandwidth and low-latency services continues to compound year-on-year.
These are encouraging signals. They point to an economy that is increasingly digital-first, where connectivity is not a support function but a core business enabler.
The real opportunity lies not in positioning fibre against wireless, but in deliberately combining the strengths of both.
However, growth at the core of the network does not automatically translate into reliable access at the edge. For many enterprises, particularly those operating across multiple sites, the challenge is not the availability of capacity, but the ability to activate, stabilise and sustain connectivity where it is needed.
Industry guidance from local fibre network operators and ISPs consistently shows that new fibre installations can take anywhere from several weeks to multiple months. Municipal wayleaves, building permissions and in-building construction continue to introduce delays, even in areas where fibre is technically present.
When projects are measured in weeks rather than days, the cost is not only operational. It directly affects billing cycles, service adoption and customer trust.
Wireless is no longer a fallback option
One of the most important shifts in recent years has been the maturation of wireless connectivity. Historically, wireless was positioned as a temporary workaround: useful in emergencies but rarely considered part of a long-term access strategy. That perception is now outdated.
Africa Analysis estimates that South Africa had more than 176 000 active microwave links by the end of 2024, supporting applications ranging from mobile backhaul, to enterprise connectivity. The same research values the local microwave connectivity market at approximately R8.3 billion, underlining its economic and strategic significance.
What has changed is not simply scale, but capability. Modern licensed microwave, particularly in higher frequency bands, delivers predictable performance, quality of service, and service level agreements aligned with enterprise expectations.
ICASA has long recognised the role of licensed spectrum in supporting reliable broadband delivery, especially where fibre rollout is constrained by geography or regulation.
In parallel, the rise of 5G and fixed wireless access is reshaping the access landscape. By the end of 2024, more than 50% of South Africa’s population had access to 5G coverage, with approximately 10.8 million active users across mobile and fixed use cases.
Forecasts suggest this could grow to over 40 million users by 2029, driven by expanding coverage and more affordable devices.
These figures matter because they reflect a broader truth: wireless is no longer experimental. It is mainstream infrastructure, capable of supporting business-critical workloads when engineered correctly.
The case for hybrid architectures
The real opportunity lies not in positioning fibre against wireless, but in deliberately combining the strengths of both. Hybrid fibre-and-wireless architectures are emerging as the most practical response to South Africa’s connectivity realities.
Wireless enables rapid activation. Sites that might otherwise wait weeks or months for fibre can be brought online in days, sometimes hours. Once fibre is installed, those same wireless links can be retained as failover paths, creating diversity at the access layer.
This approach directly addresses one of the most costly challenges facing resellers and integrators: time-to-value. When a site is dark, everything upstream is dark.
SD-WAN, voice, cloud security, collaboration platforms and observability tools do not generate revenue until connectivity is live. Shortening the gap between contract signature and service activation has a measurable impact on margins and customer satisfaction.
Recent events have also reinforced the importance of resilience. In March 2024, multiple submarine cable faults along Africa’s west coast caused widespread congestion and degraded connectivity across more than a dozen countries, including South Africa.
Microsoft publicly confirmed the impact of concurrent incidents on both west and east coast systems. Networks designed with genuine path diversity degraded gracefully. Those without it failed hard.
Resilience is not theoretical. It is tested under real-world conditions, often without warning.
Moving beyond the race to the bottom
The industry continues to wrestle with aggressive price competition. Internationally, regulators such as Ofcom in the UK consistently link service dissatisfaction to provisioning delays, fault handling and billing issues. These are precisely the most vulnerable areas when delivery and support are squeezed in pursuit of the lowest possible price.
South Africa is not immune. Commodity pricing may win short-term deals, but it often erodes the capabilities required to deliver reliable service at scale. Over time, that erosion shows up as churn, reputational damage and strained partner relationships.
The alternative is to treat reliability as a commercial strategy rather than a technical afterthought. That means prioritising clean architecture over cheap architecture, rewarding speed to activation rather than speed to quote, and designing for failure scenarios that are known to occur.
What this means for the market
The market is drawing a harder line between connectivity that merely exists and connectivity that can be relied upon. As AI-driven workloads move closer to the edge and enterprises depend on real-time systems across multiple sites, tolerance for instability will continue to shrink.
Hybrid access models are becoming the default expectation in enterprise connectivity design. Requests for proposals increasingly assume diversity at the access layer, with wireless and fibre engineered together from day one. Single-path designs are increasingly viewed as an avoidable risk rather than a cost saving.
For resellers and integrators, success will not come from quoting the lowest monthly cost, but from demonstrating credible time-to-value, honest delivery timelines and resilience that holds up under stress. Partners who can activate quickly, transition cleanly, and sustain performance will earn trust and keep it.
South Africa’s digital economy will continue to expand. The responsibility of the connectivity ecosystem is to ensure ambition is matched by execution. Networks designed for reality, not best-case assumptions, are what turn growth into uptime.
Reliability will continue to win, quietly, consistently and decisively.
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