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Cape Town – Vodacom [JSE:VOD] has announced new pricing and areas covered by its fibre to the home (FTTH) rollout plan.
Despite being hamstrung in its efforts to acquire fixed line operator Neotel, the mobile operator has been ramping up its efforts to deliver FTTH in selected areas.
“Vodacom offers FTTH in the following estates, which are outlined in the table below. We are also in various stages of planning across another 190 Estates,” Vodacom spokesperson Byron Kennedy told Fin24.
READ: New fibre player promises market disruption
Here are the estates where Vodacom has completed the build of FTTH:
Gauteng
3 on Beaufort
Aquila Estate
Borgo de Felice
Bushwillow Estate
Dainfern Valley
Eagle Canyon
Eagleton Apartments
Sibiti Reserve
Summerfield Cluster 9
Summerfield Estate
READ: 5 things you need to know about fibre internet
Western Cape
De Wijnlanden
Dennegeur
The Colosseum
KwaZulu-Natal
Mount Edgecombe
Free State
Hillandale
Woodlands Hills Estate
Vodacom also announced new pricing for the service.
FTTH with a 10Mbps (Megabits per second) line speed and 100GB data cap starts at R599 per month, and tops out at a 100Mbps line with two terabytes (2TB) of data for R1 799.
“Vodacom does not currently offer uncapped services, however, our current prices provide customers with substantial data allocation - for example 1TB of data costs R1 199 (FTTH),” said Kennedy.
Telkom [JSE:TKG] recently announced its upgrade areas for FTTH with an 8Mbps line costing R689 per month.
READ: Here's where Telkom is upgrading ADSL to fibre
Vodacom FTTH customers who run out of data can buy an additional starting at 5GB for R35, up to 50GB for R250.
As telecoms race to provide FTTH, consumers have been warned to read the terms and conditions carefully.
“Many consumers are ending up disappointed as they pay for a FTTH package, only to find that the package doesn’t come with all the peripherals to make the service work. They have had fibre laid up to their house, terminated in an easy-access but low visibility area in their home, and then they have been left to figure out how to connect to that fibre themselves,” said Calvin Collett, chief executive at iConnect Telecoms recently.
South Africa is racing to meet a 2020 deadline for universal broadband and provider Seacom estimated that replacing five million copper lines with fibre, would cost about R60bn.
WATCH this video on what you can do with FTTH:
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