For an internet service provider, a sale doesn’t happen when the truck arrives to install the router. It happens earlier – the moment a user lands on the sign-up form and decides whether to fill it out or close the tab. It is precisely at this moment that many internet service providers quietly lose customers they’ve already paid to acquire.
Telecoms has one of the worst checkout completion rates of any industry
Across industries, e-commerce checkout abandonment averages around 70%. Telecommunications sits well above that, at close to 80% – on par with high-consideration purchases like jewellery and home furnishings, categories where customers are expected to deliberate. A broadband subscription is a recurring monthly commitment, so some hesitation makes sense. But research into why people abandon checkouts points to something much more fixable than buyer's remorse: about one in five shoppers abandon specifically because the checkout process is too long or too complicated, and optimising checkout usability alone has been shown to recover over 35% of that lost conversion, according to Baymard Institute's research.
For a fibre operator, the stakes behind that number are higher than for a typical online store – and in South Africa, the gap is already visible in the national numbers. Roughly 28% of South African households now have access to fibre, based on homes passed, according to industry tracking cited by FastestFibre – but Stats SA records that only 17.4% of households actually subscribe to fixed home internet. Fibre has been built past millions of homes that haven't converted into paying customers yet. Some of that gap is genuine unmet demand or affordability. Some of it is simply people who were interested, hit friction and never finished signing up.
South Africa's fixed-broadband base is still growing quickly – FTTH and FTTB subscriptions rose 22% to 3.01 million by early 2026, per ICASA's State of the ICT Sector report – which makes closing that access-to-subscription gap more valuable, not less: every operator building into new areas in 2026, including into lower-income and township markets where several of the country's largest fibre network operators say they're focusing next, is competing for the same pool of not-yet-connected households.
What actually breaks in an ISP sign-up flow
Unlike a retail checkout, an ISP sign-up has to answer several questions before it can even take a payment: can we serve this address, at what speed, at what price, and does the customer need equipment on top of the plan? Most legacy sign-up forms handle this by making the customer do the work – call, wait for a callback, or fill in a form that later turns out to be for a service that was never available at their address in the first place.
That mismatch is where telecom's abandonment rate comes from. It isn't that people don't want broadband. It's that the sign-up process asks them to commit before it can confirm the plan actually works for them.
The fix isn't a fundamentally different sales model – it's closing that gap: confirm serviceability before asking for commitment, keep the plan and pricing logic visible throughout, and get straight to a working account instead of a "someone will call you" message.
There's already a local example of what happens when an operator treats that gap as the problem worth solving. Herotel currently records the highest FTTH take-up rate of any tracked fibre network operator in South Africa, at 48.6%, according to Africa Analysis's FTTH Quarter Tracking report – ahead of operators with far longer track records and larger existing customer bases. Herotel's own leadership has been explicit about why homes-passed numbers alone don't tell the story that matters: what counts is whether households actually connect once fibre reaches their street.
A self-service sign-up flow, in practice
A modern ISP sign-up flow generally works in four steps:
- Check the address. Before anything else, confirm the location can actually be served, and only show plans that are genuinely available there.
- Pick a plan. Show real pricing and speeds upfront, filtered to what's serviceable, so there's no back-and-forth to find out later that the advertised plan doesn't apply.
- Add what's needed. Let the customer add a router, a static IP or other extras in the same flow, rather than a separate call to sales.
- Pay and confirm. Take payment, verify identity and – where a contract is required – get it signed electronically, all before the customer leaves the page.
Get all four right, and the account is created automatically on the other end: no data entry, no manual provisioning queue, no delay between "yes, I want this" and "I'm a customer".
How Splynx approaches it
Splynx, the ISP billing and network management platform, ships a sign-up flow built around exactly this sequence. A prospective customer checks coverage at their address against the operator's own coverage maps, so only genuinely available plans are shown – the same maps the operator already uses to plan and visualise their network, now doing double duty at the point of sale.
Sign-up flow video
From there, the customer picks a plan, adds hardware or extra services through a package builder, and completes checkout: paying online, verifying by one-time passcode, and signing the contract electronically. Splynx then creates the customer account automatically, with the plan, address and any add-ons already attached – no separate data entry step for the operator's team.
Operators configure the whole flow themselves, per brand or partner if they run more than one: branding, which plans appear and how they're filtered, which form fields to collect, which payment gateways to offer and what confirmation e-mails go out afterwards.
For an ISP, the practical effect is fewer half-finished orders, fewer manual coverage checks by staff before a quote can even be given, and new customers who reach "connected" faster because their account already exists correctly by the time a technician is scheduled.
Splynx 6.0, released earlier this month, ships the redesigned sign-up flow alongside a broader set of updates spanning AI tooling, network mapping, messaging and reporting.
Share
