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Frogfoot plans to keep buying smaller fibre network operators in South Africa’s suburbs as the market consolidates, but CEO Shane Chorley stopped short of ruling out a sale of the business.
“I’d be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer,” Chorley said on the latest episode of the TechCentral Show – watch or listen below. “I would hope to say that we will be the acquirer rather than being sold.”
Frogfoot has already bought a couple of small suburban operators and wants to acquire “as many of those smaller operators as possible”, he told show host Duncan McLeod. He expects somewhat larger networks, of more than 30 000 homes, to come up for sale in the next few years, followed in time by “a much bigger consolidation of one or two of the bigger ones”.
The mooted merger of Octotel and MetroFibre had been “going on for a while”, Chorley said, and he expected consolidation among suburban operators to continue.
Abraham van der Merwe, who leads Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa, said consolidation was inevitable because “infrastructure requires scale”. But he said Frogfoot was unlikely to be consolidated any time soon because its “long-term and patient” investors, among them the founders, intend to own the business for a very long time.
The two spoke after a DNI-led consortium invested in the businesses in a deal valuing them at R14.4-billion. Most of the money will go into townships, where Van der Merwe said fewer than two million of 12 million to 15 million homes have fibre. Frogfoot wants to lift its build rate from about 80 000 connections a year to 360 000.
That untapped market is also why Van der Merwe is not worried about operators overbuilding each other. Overbuilding splits market share and wrecks the economics, he said, and there is little reason to do it when so many homes have no fibre at all. It took about a decade to connect the 4.5 million homes in the suburbs; the township market is three times that size.
5 Oct 2026
Meet the CIO | Vodacom’s Mohamed Sami on the agentic future
Mohamed Sami, group chief information officer at Vodacom, says autonomous AI agents that resolve customer problems without handing them to a human are the next big shift in customer experience – and that it is closer than many think.
Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Sami said Vodacom’s chatbots and voice bots already handle a considerable share of customer calls, while AI tools help its human agents find information without jumping between systems.
“When I say it is the next big thing, it is not something that is happening in years. It’s something that is happening very soon,” he said. How autonomous those agents become, he added, depends on how much intelligence and orchestration sits behind them.
Watch the episode
Sami also discusses:
• Where the line falls between his role and that of the group CTO as network and IT converge;
• Why Vodacom is using small language models to help large models handle isiZulu, Swahili, Amharic and Egypt’s Arabic dialects;
• How a standard set of AI agents across the software development life cycle is lifting developer productivity, and why it hasn’t cost software engineers their jobs;
• How Vodacom is trying to stop AI token bills running away, including orchestrators that route work between expensive, cheap and self-hosted models;
• Why he told the board that cybersecurity is one of the company’s biggest risks, and the programme to rebuild core platforms designed before the generative AI era; and
• What it takes to be a modern CIO, and his advice for a graduate who wants his job in 20 years.
Don’t miss a great discussion on technology in telecoms.
1 Oct 2026
TCS | Norrsken22’s Lexi Novitske on how China is winning African tech
Chinese companies have built their position in African technology one layer at a time – first phones and telecoms equipment, then fintech and now the AI models that local start-ups build on. American private capital, meanwhile, is pulling back. Lexi Novitske, general partner at Norrsken22, thinks US investors will regret it.
Novitske moved to Nigeria in 2012 and has invested from Lagos ever since. Norrsken22, a pan-African growth fund backed by Nordic tech founders including those behind Klarna, Skype and Minecraft, closed its debut fund at US$205-million in 2023. It is now about halfway through deploying that capital, with no exits yet.
In this episode of the TechCentral Show, she expands on the argument TechCentral reported last week: that African start-ups are increasingly building on Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen because they are cheaper and more available, and that the US risks losing both a young, digital-first market and access to its data.
In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Novitske also discusses:
• How Nigeria’s start-up scene has changed since she began as an angel investor;
• Why unpredictable regulation and a shortage of top talent are bigger obstacles for Nigerian founders than power cuts;
• How Chinese-backed OPay and PalmPay won Nigerian fintech by absorbing years of losses, and why that now makes regulators uneasy;
• Why Silicon Valley’s AI boom has drawn venture capital away from Africa, and when she expects it to return;
• Why Egypt and South Africa offer the best opportunities right now, with Nigeria likely to follow; and
• What Optasia’s oversubscribed JSE listing means for Johannesburg, why the biggest African fintechs are looking to New York, London and Hong Kong instead, and why one or two winners can return an entire fund.
Don’t miss the discussion!
Inside a recent episode
Watts & Wheels | Why electric trucks are beating electric cars to South Africa
Published 3 Sept 2026 · Transcript excerpt
[…] Now, when you look at charging for fleets as well, there's an opportunity there because traditionally you'll have to go and take your truck or whatever it is to fuel up. Whereas now when you're loading cargo or offloading cargo, there's an opportunity to charge within that. So it requires some route planning on that. But yeah, that's where charging comes into it. So I want to touch on the total cost of ownership here, because as I think we both agree, mathematics rules the world, right? So you've got to get your math right. So if we're talking total cost of ownership, does that also include the total cost of installing charging infrastructure and running that charging infrastructure and maintaining that charging infrastructure, given now that I own my own fuel pump, which is what the charging infrastructure is within my own fleet? […]
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