Does Your Fibre Need a UPS in 2026? What Cable Theft and Local Outages Mean for Your Internet

Eskom's official position on winter 2026 is the most optimistic it has been in years. In its winter outlook covering 1 April to 31 August, the utility projected no scheduled load shedding under its base case, pointing to a roughly 7.1GW drop in unplanned capacity losses since March and a system availability figure hovering around 98.9%. For a country that spent the better part of a decade budgeting its evenings around Stage 2 to Stage 6, that's genuinely good news, and it's the headline most South Africans have seen this winter.

But "no load shedding" and "no risk to your internet connection" are not the same claim, and the gap between them showed up loudly in the same week this article was written. On 22 July 2026, City Power said it had recorded 19 separate infrastructure-related security incidents across Johannesburg over just one weekend (17-20 July) - cable theft, attempted theft and vandalism, with confirmed losses of more than R311,000 from only five of those incidents. A week earlier, on 14 July, cable thieves vandalised the Queendustria substation in Komani, cutting electricity to thousands of homes and businesses in the area from around 11:30pm. Neither of those events had anything to do with Eskom's national supply picture - they were local, criminal, and exactly the kind of outage that a national "no load shedding" forecast says nothing about.

That distinction matters more for fibre customers than most people realise, because fibre's biggest power dependency isn't in the ground - it's in your house.

It's a genuinely useful fact that gets lost in most outage conversations: the glass fibre-optic cable running from the street into your home carries light, not electricity. A dark fibre line has no current in it and nothing to lose power. That's part of why fibre is inherently more resilient to a certain category of fault than old copper phone lines ever were - there's no live copper for lightning, moisture or corrosion to compromise in the same way.

The catch is everything on either end of that glass. At your house, the fibre terminates in an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) - a small box, sometimes built into your router, sometimes separate - that converts the light signal into the electronic signal your router, laptop and smart TV can actually use. That conversion requires mains power. So does your WiFi router. So does any mesh extender node you've added around the house. The moment the plug point they're connected to loses power, your ONT stops converting light into signal and your router stops broadcasting WiFi - regardless of whether the fibre itself, three streets away or three suburbs away, is perfectly intact.

On most standard residential fibre installations in South Africa, none of that equipment has battery backup by default. Some fibre network operators (FNOs) offer battery-backed ONTs as an optional extra on business-grade or voice-critical lines, where a dropped connection has a direct cost, but the ONT and router that ship with a typical home fibre install run purely off your wall socket. If the power at your specific address drops - whether from a national load-shedding stage, a municipal fault, or a cable thief three properties down - your fibre connection drops with it, even on a completely healthy network.

It's worth holding both halves of the picture at once, because each one calls for a different response.

Nationally, the trend is real and positive. Eskom's winter outlook attributes the improvement to fewer unplanned breakdowns across the coal fleet, stronger maintenance execution, and reduced reliance on expensive emergency diesel generation. The utility's own risk scenarios still allow for load shedding if unplanned losses climb from the current roughly 9.1GW back up toward 13,000-16,000MW during a cold snap - Eskom has been explicit that Stage 2 to Stage 6 remain on the table in a high-risk case between 18 May and 12 August - but the base case, and the one most households are experiencing, is a stable grid.

Locally, infrastructure crime is the more immediate threat to a fibre connection staying up. Copper cable theft has been a persistent problem at municipal electricity infrastructure for years, and City Power's Isaac Mangena described the July weekend spike in terms that will sound familiar to anyone who has lost power to a substation fault before: "Communities are critical partners in the fight against electricity theft, illegal connections and vandalism, which continue to undermine service delivery and places lives at risk." The Jeppestown incident alone accounted for roughly 400 metres of stolen copper cable in one theft. None of this is fibre theft in the sense covered by Icasa's proposed national infrastructure database (see our breakdown of that draft regulation and the cable-theft risk it's trying to manage) - it's theft of the electricity network that keeps your ONT and router powered, which is a separate but equally disruptive failure point for your internet.

The practical upshot: the biggest threat to your fibre connection in 2026 probably isn't a nationally announced load-shedding stage anymore. It's a localised, often unannounced power event - a municipal fault, storm damage, or a theft incident on your street - that Eskom's winter outlook was never designed to predict or prevent.

The sequence is quick and unglamorous. Within seconds of losing power, your ONT and router go dark. Any device already connected over WiFi loses its connection almost immediately; anything on a wired Ethernet link loses it the instant the switch or router in between stops receiving power. If you have a mesh WiFi system, every node without its own backup power drops out independently, which is why a household can sometimes end up with "internet but no WiFi in the back bedroom" during a partial outage if only one plug circuit is affected.

Mobile data on your phone is unaffected, which is exactly why most people don't notice a router outage until they try to use a laptop, smart TV, security camera system, VoIP line or smart-home hub - anything that depends on the home network specifically rather than a phone's own cellular signal. For anyone working from home, on a video call, or running a home-based business off a fixed line, that gap is the actual cost of an unplanned local outage, independent of what Eskom's stage system says is happening nationally.

Not everyone needs to spend money solving a problem they rarely have. A reasonable way to decide:

• You lose power more than once every few months for reasons other than scheduled load shedding (storms, municipal faults, cable theft in your area, ageing local infrastructure) - a UPS is a small, one-time cost against a recurring annoyance.
• You work from home, run a business over your fixed line, or rely on VoIP, alarm systems or security cameras that need the internet - the cost of one missed call or one gap in camera footage usually exceeds the price of a basic UPS many times over.
• You already run a generator or inverter for the rest of the house - in this case the question isn't whether to add backup power, it's whether your router and ONT are actually wired into that existing backup circuit, which is a five-minute check rather than a new purchase.
• Your outages are rare and brief, and a dropped connection for twenty minutes genuinely doesn't affect you - in that case, spending money on a UPS is solving a problem you don't meaningfully have.

You don't need an inverter and a battery wall to keep a router and ONT running - both draw very little power (typically somewhere in the region of 10-25W combined for a standard ONT and router, more if you're also powering a mesh node). That low draw is what makes even a small UPS disproportionately effective for internet specifically, compared to trying to keep a fridge or geyser running through the same outage.

Prices above are indicative retail ranges for the South African market in 2026, not quotes from any specific supplier, and will vary by brand, battery chemistry and stock availability. The general pattern holds regardless of retailer: because networking equipment draws so little power, even an entry-level unit tends to comfortably outlast the local outages most households actually experience, which are usually measured in minutes to a few hours rather than a full day.

A UPS that's wired up wrong is a UPS that fails exactly when you need it. A short checklist:

• Check the combined draw of what you're protecting. Add up the wattage (or amps × volts) printed on your ONT's and router's power adapters. Most residential setups draw well under 30W combined - comfortably inside even a small UPS's capacity.
• Only plug in what needs to stay up. A UPS sized for your router and ONT will drain far faster if you also plug in a TV, decoder or desktop PC on the same unit. Keep it dedicated to networking gear if runtime during an outage is the priority.
• Include your mesh node, not just the main router, if WiFi coverage in a specific room matters to you during an outage - a UPS on the router alone won't help a mesh node in another part of the house that's on a different plug circuit.
• Test it before you need it. Unplug the wall power (not the UPS itself) and confirm your internet actually stays up, rather than discovering during a real outage that a cable was loose or the battery was already flat.
• Check the battery periodically. Small UPS batteries, like any sealed lead-acid or lithium pack, degrade over a few years. A unit that worked perfectly when new can quietly fail to hold charge two or three years later.
• If you already have a generator or inverter, confirm your ONT and router are on a circuit that's actually covered by it - it's a common gap for a household to have backup power for lights and a fridge but not for the plug point the router happens to be on.

Backup power at your house solves your side of the problem, but it's not the only piece. If an outage takes down a local aggregation point, a fault at your FNO, or the municipal supply feeding a wider area for an extended period, no amount of UPS capacity at your address will help beyond its own runtime. That's part of why the regulatory and infrastructure conversation happening in parallel matters: Icasa's draft rapid-deployment framework, which held public hearings in mid-July 2026, proposes a national database of fibre routes, poles and ducts partly to speed up fault response and infrastructure protection - a move we cover in detail in our piece on the database and the cable-theft risk it raises. Individual FNOs are also judged and compared on fault-resolution speed as a competitive differentiator, not just headline speed or price, which is worth factoring in if outage resilience matters to you when choosing a network in the first place.

• Check what your ONT and router actually draw in watts - it's almost always low enough for a modest UPS to handle.
• Buy backup power sized to that draw, not to your whole house's needs, if internet continuity is your specific goal.
• Include any WiFi mesh nodes in rooms where you need coverage to survive an outage.
• Test the setup by physically pulling wall power, not just trusting the spec sheet.
• If you already run a generator or inverter, confirm your networking gear is on a covered circuit.
• Ask your ISP whether a battery-backed ONT is available if you're on a business-grade line or your household genuinely can't tolerate downtime.
• Keep your ISP's support number saved somewhere that doesn't depend on your home WiFi (i.e. not only in a WiFi-calling app).

Eskom's improved winter outlook is real, and it means most South African households are heading into the rest of 2026 with less scheduled load shedding than they've seen in years. But "less load shedding" was never the same promise as "no risk to your internet" - as the same week's City Power and Komani incidents made clear. Because your fibre connection's weakest link sits at your own wall socket rather than in the ground outside, a small, correctly sized UPS is one of the cheapest, highest-leverage upgrades a fibre household can make in 2026 - not because the network is unreliable, but because the last few metres of any fibre connection still run on ordinary household electricity.