ADSL on its last legs in South Africa

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  By   Daniel Puchert Partially state-owned telecommunications company Telkom announced in its financial results for the year ending 31 March 2025 that its ADSL subscribers had more than halved to under 30,000. According to the company’s operational data, ADSL lines decreased from 64,959 in March 2024 to 29,770. This 54.2% decline highlights that the legacy broadband technology is slowly approaching the end of the road. Telkom’s ADSL business peaked at the end of March 2016 with 1.01 million subscribers — two years after fibre upstart Vumatel  broke ground in Parkhurst . What followed was a sharp decline in Telkom ADSL subscribers. Customers connected to its copper networks decreased by more than 500,000 over the next four years. This was partly driven by Telkom itself, which began actively switching off its copper network in some neighbourhoods. If it did not have fibre in the area, it would offer a “fixed line lookalike” wireless service that ran over its cellular ...
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South Africa’s WhatsApp competitor that doesn’t use data

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 25 September 2021

Messaging app Moya has 3.5 million daily active users and 6.5 million monthly active users in South Africa, developer Datafree has announced.

Datafree CEO Gour Lentell has also told MyBroadband that the app has consistently ranked in the top 5 most downloaded applications on the Google Play store in South Africa for several weeks.

Lentell said that Moya has often outperformed WhatsApp and TikTok in terms of downloads in South Africa.

What sets Moya apart from its competitors is that it doesn’t consume your mobile data but relies on reverse-billing agreements with MTN, Vodacom, Telkom, and Cell C.

According to Datafree, Moya lets you send messages and voice notes, and offers access to several other services without paying for the data.

The company said that Moya works on the supported networks even when you have no airtime or data balance.

Lentell explained that they subsidise users’ data costs in several different ways.

“Similar to the Google, WeChat and Facebook models, Moya’s strategy is to build audience distribution at scale and monetise it in multiple ways with the range of services being expanded consistently and over time,” he said.

One of those ways is through business messaging, examples of which are:

  • Businesses placing their websites in the Moya Discover marketplace and paying reverse bill data costs to engage the Moya audience.
  • Full-screen vertical video ads which are data-free, using the same format as Instagram stories ads.
  • Moya Business API for enterprise messaging and chatbots, similar to the WhatsApp Business API.
  • Moya Research — market research service, which the company says is being used by the major market research companies in South Africa.

While advertising is a component of Moya’s revenue model, Lentell said it is minimal.

Another service that earns money for the platform and helps offset user data charges is MoyaPayD, a payment service from which Datafree receives transaction fees.

While MoyaPayD was only “soft-launched” in July, Datafree announced this week that it had passed 100,000 registered users.

Lentell said that an e-wallet payment platform is an essential part of the vision of Moya.

“Similar to the WeChat model in China, MoyaPayD brings a new dimension to Moya giving users a fully integrated and digitally inclusive way to interact with the services they need, without having to leave the application,” he said.

According to Lentell, they are working on several key features for MoyaPayD.

These include user payments for premium and subscription content, a Moya business portal for MoyaPayD merchants and employee payroll services, partnerships with financial service providers, and a new release of Datafree’s classifieds service.

“The marketplace for merchant sales is a key priority for us at the moment, with a large focus on opening up the marketplace on Moya to make it easier for anyone to be a part of the app,” Lentell said.

“We will be adding merchant services so that businesses can pay employees within Moya or get paid through Moya.”

The company also recently announced that it is working on an iOS version of Moya.

It said that the first version of Moya for iPhone would have data-free messaging and MoyaPayD.

Datafree also stated that the first version of Moya for iPhone would not have the Discover part of the app — mainly because Apple has stringent rules about how apps must look and work.

Lentell said that they have big ambitions for Moya.

“At our current growth rate, we have no doubt that we will hit our target of 25 million active users by 2023.”

Now read: The rise of WhatsApp in South Africa — and how it can fall

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS: SOUTH AFRICA'S WHATSAPP COMPETITOR T… 

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