South African fibre network operators and ISPs have slashed the price of fibre-to-the-home products.

Fibre network operators and Internet service providers (ISPs) in South Africa have slashed the price of fibre-to-the-home products in recent months.
Openserve started the price war in March when it upgraded speeds and cut prices on its fibre products. These changes came at no additional cost to its ISP partners.
Many fibre network operators followed, including Frogfoot, MetroFibre, and Herotel increasing the speeds and cutting the prices of their fibre products.
Frogfoot permanently increased the line speeds of fibre packages of 50Mbps and below shortly after Openserves announcement.
The speed of Frogfoots 5Mbps and 10Mbps entry-level fibre-to-the-home packages were also increased to 30Mbps.
Herotel was next. It improved the value proposition on its 10Mbps, 50Mbps, 100Mbps, and 200Mbps packages and added new 75Mbps and 1Gbps services.
Pressure started to mount on other network operators to follow suit, and this is exactly what happened.
MetroFibre announced in April that it was increasing the speeds of its fibre products and introduced a new 300Mbps service from 1 June 2021.
Like other operators, MetroFibre discontinued its entry-level 10Mbps service and replaced it with a 25Mbps product.
Last week Octotel announced its 15/15Mbps entry-level package will be adjusted to 35/25Mbps, and the 30/30Mbps service will move up to 50/50Mbps.
The market is already price-sensitive, but the demand for a fast, robust and stable fibre network has become the highest priority for most consumers, said Octotel COO Scott Cunningham.
All eyes were on Vumatel following better deals from other large fibre providers. They did not disappoint.
This week many ISPs, including Afrihost and Cool Ideas, unveiled new Vumatel fibre-to-the-home prices.
Vumatel said it reviewed and adjusted its products to simplify its product offerings in line with ISP feedback.
Vumatel increased the speeds of all its fibre services and replaced its entry-level 10Mbps service with a 20Mbps product.
The speed upgrades and wholesale price cuts from fibre network operators quickly filtered down to end-users.
Afrihost, Axxess, Cool Ideas, RSAWEB, and other ISPs have cut their fibre prices in line with the wholesale changes.
The table below provides an overview of the new fibre prices from Afrihost. A single ISP was selected to illustrate the difference in pricing based on fibre network operator.