Confidence in South Africa’s fibre network operators (FNOs) is slipping.
This is among the findings from the FNO perception survey released by Internet industry association ISPA.
The February 2024 poll measured the views of about 50 Internet service providers (ISPs) views on South Africa’s many FNOs.
ISPA’s members were asked to rate the FNOs they do business with across 11 criteria, on a scale of 0 to 10.
ISPs’ views of Link Africa and Liquid Intelligent Networks have improved the most in the last six months.
Opinions on Metrofibre and Octotel have remained positive, while the scores for Frogfoot, Openserve, Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa have all dropped.
| Fibre Network Operator | Ave score (Aug 2023) | Ave score (Feb 2024) | Change |
| Metrofibre | 6.8 | 6.9 | +0.1 |
| Link Africa | 5.9 | 6.8 | +0.9 |
| Octotel | 6.8 | 6.5 | -0.3 |
| Openserve | 7.0 | 6.1 | -0.9 |
| Liquid Intelligent Networks | 4.7 | 5.9 | +1.2 |
| Frogfoot | 6.3 | 5.3 | -1.0 |
| Vumatel | 6.0 | 5.2 | -0.8 |
| Dark Fibre Africa | 5.8 | 5.0 | -0.8 |
| Average | 6.2 | 6.0 | –0.2 |
The two top-rated FNOs also dominated the rankings for the individual metrics, with Metrofibre scoring highest for technical proficiency (7.5), communications (6.9), friendliness of staff (7.9), business processes (7.4), software systems (6.9), and optimism (6.7), while Link Africa excelled in value for money (7.8) and open access principles (7.9).
Despite slipping significantly in the overall ratings, Openserve retained top spot for reliability (7.9). Octotel remained the FNO with the best support for ISPs (7.1).
The two networks that ISPs were most likely to recommend to other ISPs were Metrofibre and Liquid Intelligent Networks (tied at 6.4).
Overall, ISPA notes that ISPs’ confidence in their FNOs has slipped slightly since August, with the annual average of all FNOs dropping by 0.2 points to 6.0.
The lowest scoring criteria overall are:
* Optimism about whether an FNO will improve in the future (5.5);
* Support provided to ISPs by FNOs (5.4); and
* The likelihood of recommending a particular FNO to another ISP (5.3).
FNOs hoping to improve their score in the future should consider streamlining the support they provide to ISPs making sure they have processes and staff capacity to resolve common issues, such as the difficulties consumers face when trying to migrate lines between ISPs.
For the February survey, ISPs were given the opportunity to provide freeform feedback to each FNO. This feedback unexpectedly revealed the importance of FNOs’ account managers. ISPs with a good account manager tended to rate that FNO far more positively, while those with a less skilled account manager were much more critical towards that FNO overall.
ISPA used the release of the February survey results to highlight the number of smaller FNOs providing services to ISPs.
The Internet industry association notes that although only nine operators were rated by a significant number of ISPs, there were another 23 networks included in the ratings.
Despite being ranked by fewer ISPs, some of those networks did very well, with Evotel (7.5) and Zoom Fibre (7.4) achieving higher averages than all of the large networks. Lightspeed (6.7), Lightstruck (6.5), Thinkspeed (6.3) and Seacom FibreCo (6.2) also fared well.
The full table of results for all of the networks surveyed can be viewed here.