SA’s fibre bottleneck needs wireless breakthrough

Justin Mackenzie, Managing Director, VO Connect. (Image: Supplied)

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South Africa’s digital economy is accelerating fast. With a projected 92% increase in national data centre capacity by 2030, rising from 501.1MW to 962.4MW, according to Africa Data Centres, businesses across sectors are demanding faster, more reliable internet connections than ever before. However, there's a bottleneck that continues to frustrate progress: fibre deployment.

The narrative is familiar to anyone in the telco resale space. Despite fibre being available “in the ground” or even within a building, getting a business customer live can take anywhere from six to 12 weeks. Between municipal wayleaves, permissions from landlords, construction delays and scheduling issues with third-party contractors, the process remains stubbornly slow, even in metro areas. That’s a month or more of lost productivity for the customer, and a month where the reseller isn’t billing.

In an economy where every day of uptime matters, this has real financial consequences. For businesses requiring immediate connectivity, it’s a momentum killer. And for executives in large ISPs or telco integrators, it’s a scale inhibitor. The result? Slow fibre installs are costing business growth.

But what if there was a way to solve the problem? Not with promises of faster fibre, but by sidestepping the delay altogether.

That’s exactly what a growing number of resellers are doing by leveraging wireless-to-fibre hybrid connectivity models. Instead of waiting for fibre, resellers are switching on business customers using high capacity, licensed microwave links, getting them connected in hours or days, then migrating them seamlessly to fibre when it’s ready and continuing to use the wireless as a reliable backup on a fully redundant solution. This isn’t a workaround. It’s a strategic rethink.

Justin Mackenzie, Managing Director of VO Connect, believes this model should become standard practice across the channel. “We all know the pain of waiting for fibre. That’s why we built the business around being able to activate instantly. We’ve deployed clients in under 12 hours,” he says.

The secret lies in two things: ownership and flexibility. VO Connect uses its own internal deployment teams, not outsourced field staff. That means feasibility checks and installations can be done on demand, often in the same week. And because the microwave connectivity runs on licensed spectrum, there’s none of the congestion or unreliability that plagues lower-tier WISPs operating on unlicensed bands.

But perhaps the real innovation is contractual. “Customers sign a single agreement,” explains Mackenzie. “They’re not buying ‘wireless now and maybe fibre later'. They’re buying a fibre service with wireless as the immediate activation layer, and ultimately, the backup layer too.”

The failover benefit is significant. In an environment where resilience is increasingly critical, especially with the rise of hosted cloud services, video collaboration and latency-sensitive apps, having a secondary path baked in offers real peace of mind and zero downtime.

For businesses seeking connectivity, this changes the game. “You can sign the deal today, install tomorrow and be connected next week,” says Mackenzie. “That means scaling happens faster and business moves quicker.”

It’s a model that’s resonating strongly with ISPs and telco integrators that service large enterprises, mines, campuses and other mid-market or multi-site operations. Especially in areas where fibre access is technically available but practically delayed.

And with government pushing for expanded broadband access in underserved areas, the flexibility of this model provides an immediate tool for digital inclusion. While fibre remains the long-term goal, licensed microwave allows for a rapid start.

Critically, this isn’t a compromise on quality. “Microwave has often been misunderstood,” Mackenzie says. “But on managed spectrum with the right equipment, it’s high capacity, stable and perfect for enterprise workloads. The market perception is finally catching up.”

VO Connect isn’t new to this space. The company’s roots trace back to the dial-up days of the 1990s and evolved through ADSL, gated community fibre roll-outs and point-to-point wireless before securing a national point-to-multipoint licence in 2015. That licence allows them to compete with fibre on both scale and performance, but with unmatched agility.

And agility is perhaps the word that defines the company’s approach.

“We’re not the cheapest,” Mackenzie says, “but we offer genuine value and we solve problems that our competitors won’t touch. That’s why our resellers trust us when the pressure is on to deliver.”

For a market stuck between growing digital demands and the slow pace of infrastructure roll-out, that kind of responsiveness may be exactly what South Africa’s connectivity landscape needs.