Openserve Completes Third Fibre Route After 2025 Outage

In Short

• Openserve finished a third major fibre route linking Cape Town to Pretoria, via Springbok and Mahikeng.
• The goal is more redundancy, so national traffic can keep flowing if other routes fail.
• Openserve says its fibre-to-the-home connectivity rate hit 53.9% in the quarter ended June 2026.

What Happened

Openserve, Telkom’s infrastructure unit, says it has completed a new long-distance fibre route from Cape Town to Pretoria. The route runs through Springbok and Mahikeng. Openserve built it to reduce the chance of major network outages.

Redundancy means having backup paths. It is like keeping a second and third road available if the main highway is blocked. Openserve said its network was designed with two main routes, but both routes went down during a severe break in September 2025. That incident isolated a large part of the country, according to an Openserve network executive.

The company says it focuses on “layer zero restoration.” This means traffic can reroute at the physical fibre layer in milliseconds when a cable is cut. Fast rerouting matters because fibre breaks can happen during construction work or through sabotage.

Openserve operates as a wholesale fibre provider. Wholesale means it sells capacity to other licensed operators and enterprises, rather than directly to most end users. It manages about 180,000km of wholesale fibre network in South Africa.

On residential broadband, Openserve reported a 53.9% fibre-to-the-home connectivity rate for the quarter ended June 2026. In fibre terms, “homes passed” means homes that can be connected because fibre is already in the area. The company said it invested R379m in that quarter and increased homes passed by 26,541 to 1.56 million.

Why It Matters

South Africa’s internet depends on national fibre backbones that most users never see. When major routes fail, banks, enterprises, mobile operators, and ISPs can all lose capacity at once.

A third route gives Openserve more options to keep traffic running during widespread failures. For operators and businesses buying wholesale capacity, that can translate into fewer outages and better service level agreements, especially on high-demand corridors like Cape Town to Gauteng.