Herotel has become South Africa is the largest retail fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) internet service provider by Connected Homes, according to the latest Africa Analysis FTTH Quarterly Tracking Report.
Stellenbosch-based ISP, which is Owned by Vumatelsaid it had 284,850 connected FTTH homes at the latest count – way ahead of other vertically integrated retail ISPs in the market. This figure does not include the company's fixed-wireless customer base, which is 52 094.
“Largest ISP” Claim Location herotel At the top of the ranking for South African retail ISPs that own and operate their own access networks from end to end. It is not a measure of total fiber network coverage nor a measure of total broadband subscribers across all access types, where multi-FNO retail ISPs such as Afrihost compete in a separate segment.
What is interesting is where Herotel is adding customers. The company has built a closed access fiber and wireless business targeting small towns, peri-urban areas and townships, rather than the established metro suburbs that drove the first decade of South African fiber development.
It now has over 350,000 active customers in over 550 cities, and over 612,000 homes ready for connection. Its prepaid fiber product, which lets users top up like airtime instead of signing a long-term contract, has helped it gain customers in areas where contract-based fiber providers struggle to reach.
township push
In some township areas it has already entered – including Jouberton, Kanana and Siyabuswa – Herotel says customers are consuming more than 1TB of data a month at an effective cost of less than 50c/GB. The company is targeting an additional 750,000 households in township communities, aiming to expand its reach to more than 1.1 million households and reach nearly six million people.
That township push puts Herotel in direct competition with Fibertime, the pay-as-you-go fiber roll-out that was founded by Herotel's former co-founder Alan Knott-Craig Jr. after his 2022 exit. Fibertime has secured the support of Nokia and Finfund to deploy FTTH in 14 townships, with the signing of an expansion to an additional 400,000 households in October 2025.
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Herotel CEO Van Zyl Botha said the real test is “whether people can stay connected and use that connection for school, work, business, communications and entertainment without constantly managing data limits”. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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