Openserve Fires Back in the Fibre ISP Row

Two weeks ago we covered Openserve's launch of Openserve ISP - a direct-to-consumer retail fibre service sold by the same company that operates the wholesale network more than 200 independent ISPs resell under their own brands. The concern at the time was structural: Openserve had quietly told its wholesale partners by email on 10 July, three days before the rest of the industry found out, that it was now competing with them for the same households.

Openserve stayed largely quiet on the specifics for a week and a half. That changed on 21 July, when the company gave TechCentral a detailed on-the-record defence of the launch - market share numbers, pricing justifications and a direct rebuttal of the anti-competitive framing. Within a day, two of the loudest critics of the original launch had responded in kind. This is where the story stands now: a company defending its numbers, an industry association asking for proof rather than promises, and a genuine question about what "equal treatment" needs to look like when the referee is also playing.

It's tempting to read this as an argument between corporates that doesn't touch ordinary fibre customers. It does, and the reason is worth spelling out before getting into the specifics of who said what. South Africa's fibre market looks the way it does - more than 75 active ISPs, prices that have fallen in real terms for years, genuine differentiation on service and support rather than just price - because of a specific structural choice network operators made early on: build the physical cable, sell wholesale access to any ISP that wants it on the same terms, and don't compete with your own customers at the retail level. That's the open-access model, and it's why a household on Openserve's network can pick from dozens of resellers rather than being stuck with whatever the cable owner decides to charge.

That model only works if the "same terms for everyone" part is actually true and actually verifiable. The moment a network operator starts selling retail itself, every customer on that network - not just the ones who might switch to Openserve ISP specifically - has a stake in whether the operator is still treating its 200-plus wholesale partners fairly. If it isn't, the resellers squeezed hardest are often the smaller, more price-competitive ones that don't have the balance sheet to absorb a bad quarter, which is exactly the part of the market that keeps prices honest for everyone else. A dispute that looks like corporate positioning from the outside is, underneath, a dispute about whether the mechanism that produced South Africa's unusually competitive fibre pricing keeps working the way it has for the past decade.

Openserve's central argument is a numbers one. According to the company, Openserve ISP accounts for roughly 21% of the homes its fibre network passes and about 20% of the homes actually connected to that network - figures the company says sit "well below the threshold for dominance" under the Competition Act, which treats 35% market share as the point where a rebuttable presumption of market power kicks in. The message, stripped of the framing: Openserve ISP is a new, still-small competitor inside a market it doesn't control, not a dominant firm squeezing out rivals.

On pricing, Openserve says the free-modem, free-install, month-to-month bundle that rattled resellers is not a special retail-only privilege - it's built from "standard wholesale constructs available to every ISP on the Openserve network," and Openserve ISP buys its own network access "at the same published rate card, as any third-party ISP." In other words: any of the 200-plus resellers could, in principle, assemble the identical offer from the identical published price list, because Openserve ISP isn't drawing on a secret internal discount.

The company's justification for launching at all leans on unmet demand rather than competition: Openserve's fibre network passes roughly 1.5 million homes, and about half of those remain unconnected - "a figure that has proven persistent over time," in Openserve's own description. Chief Commercial Officer Makgosi Mabaso has framed Openserve ISP as a way to close that gap directly, in support of "broader digital inclusion in South Africa," rather than as an attempt to out-compete the resellers already serving the connected half.

Taken together, it's a coherent defence on its own terms: a modest and shrinking gap in market share, a pricing structure Openserve says any reseller could replicate from the public rate card, and a stated purpose - closing the connected/unconnected gap on its own network - that doesn't obviously require competing head-on with existing resellers for households that are already connected. The open question, which the rest of this story is really about, is whether "could replicate in principle" and "does replicate in practice" are the same thing once free hardware, waived installation and a month-to-month term all have to be paid for somewhere in the business.

Not everyone finds the "underserved communities" framing convincing, and the sharpest published critique so far comes from Paul Colmer of the Wireless Access Providers' Association, writing on IT-Online. His argument is arithmetic rather than ideological: Openserve ISP sells eight packages in total, and only two of them - the R345 and R425 entry tiers - are priced in a range that plausibly reaches a lower-income household. The other six run from R499 up to R1,449 a month, squarely in the same premium bracket the existing 200-plus resellers already compete hard for.

The freebies, Colmer points out, don't track the "underserved" story either. Every one of the eight packages - not just the two cheapest - comes with a free Wi-Fi router, a waived installation fee and a R250 Netflix voucher. "If reaching poorer households were genuinely the point," he wrote, "the freebies would sit on the R345 product, not the R1,449 one." A retail launch genuinely built to close a digital-inclusion gap, in his framing, would concentrate its incentives on the cheap end of the range it claims to be targeting - not spread them evenly across a product line that's mostly competing for the same premium households everyone else is already fighting over.

Colmer's piece also revisits the structural point from the original launch story: Openserve still controls pricing, order processing, customer data and provisioning queues for every ISP on its network, including its own retail arm. None of that requires deliberate favouritism to be a problem - it just requires Openserve ISP to be treated as a slightly-more-equal internal customer, which is exactly the scenario the 2013 Telkom settlement and 2023 Openserve separation were built to close off.

The most quoted line to come out of the row so far belongs to Easttel CEO Mark Gray, responding directly to Openserve's rate-card defence: "In a market with this history, a promise is not enough. Equality must be auditable." It's a pointed choice of words - "this history" is a direct reference to Telkom's 2013 Competition Commission settlement, where the company paid a R200 million penalty for margin-squeezing rival ISPs, and to Openserve's 2023 legal separation into a standalone company specifically to prevent a repeat.

Gray's point is that a same-rate-card assurance, given verbally to a journalist, isn't the same thing as a same-rate-card guarantee an independent party can actually check. The Internet Service Providers' Association appears to agree: its members want written undertakings that Openserve's retail arm buys network access on identical terms, through identical systems, on identical timescales to any third-party reseller - and that customer and coverage data belonging to resellers is ring-fenced from the retail business rather than visible inside the same corporate walls. Ispa has said it is canvassing its membership and will raise the matter with Openserve's management or the competition authorities "as appropriate" if those undertakings aren't forthcoming.

Put plainly, the request isn't "stop selling retail fibre." It's "prove, in a form we can verify, that you're not using your position as the network operator to give your own retail arm an advantage no reseller can match." Openserve has not yet responded publicly to the specific ask for a written, auditable undertaking - it has answered the market-share and rate-card questions, but not, as of this writing, the request for independently verifiable proof.

What would that kind of proof actually look like in practice? In comparable regulated open-access markets - energy grids, ports, rail networks - the standard tools are things like an independently audited annual compliance report confirming retail and wholesale pricing stayed aligned, a published service-level agreement guaranteeing identical provisioning and fault-repair timescales for the operator's own retail arm and every third-party reseller, and a technical or legal ring-fence preventing staff on the retail side from accessing wholesale-only systems like competitor order queues or customer databases. None of that is exotic or unprecedented - it's the standard toolkit regulators reach for whenever a single company ends up playing both referee and player in the same market. Whether Openserve adopts something along those lines, resists it, or lets the Competition Commission decide the terms is the practical question this dispute now turns on.

Openserve's 21%-and-20% figures are real numbers and, on their face, genuinely below the 35% threshold South African competition law uses as the starting point for a rebuttable presumption of dominance. Reported accurately, that's a fair defence against the specific charge of "acting like a dominant firm" in the strict legal sense - and it's worth taking at face value rather than dismissing as spin.

But market share is only the first question a competition analysis asks, not the last one. The Competition Act's dominance test also considers whether a firm has market power that a raw share number doesn't capture - and the entire complaint from Ispa, WAPA and Easttel is precisely that kind of power: Openserve doesn't need a large slice of the retail market to squeeze competitors, because it controls the wholesale input every one of those competitors depends on to operate at all. A firm with a modest retail footprint can still exercise outsized influence over a market if it's simultaneously the supplier every rival in that market has no alternative to. That's the structural argument the 2013 Telkom case turned on, and it's a different question from "how big is Openserve ISP's retail business right now" - which is why critics haven't been satisfied by the market-share figures alone, even though the figures themselves aren't in dispute.

None of this means Openserve is currently breaching competition law - no regulator has opened a formal inquiry, and no finding has been made. It means the 21%/20% defence answers a narrower question than the one being asked. Whether that gap gets closed with a written undertaking, a Competition Commission complaint, or nothing at all is the open question the next few weeks should start to answer.

• 10 July 2026 - Openserve emails wholesale partners privately to inform them Openserve ISP is launching.
• 13-14 July 2026 - The launch becomes public; Ispa tells TechCentral its members are concerned, and we covered the story here.
• 20 July 2026 - WAPA's Paul Colmer publishes a detailed rebuttal on IT-Online, disputing Openserve's "underserved communities" justification on the package pricing and freebie structure.
• 21 July 2026 - Openserve gives TechCentral its first detailed on-record defence: market share figures, rate-card assurances and the 1.5-million-homes rationale. Easttel's Mark Gray responds the same day with the "equality must be auditable" line.
• Ongoing - Ispa says it is canvassing members and may escalate to the Competition Commission; Openserve has not yet publicly addressed the specific request for a written, auditable undertaking.

Three things are worth watching. First, whether Openserve responds to the specific written-undertaking request rather than the broader dominance question - agreeing to an independently auditable separation between its retail and wholesale operations would defuse most of the structural complaint even if the retail business keeps growing. Second, whether Ispa's canvassing of its members turns into a formal Competition Commission complaint, which would put the below-cost-pricing and data-ring-fencing claims in front of a regulator empowered to actually test them rather than leaving the dispute as a war of press statements. Third, whether any other major network operator - Vumatel, MetroFibre, Frogfoot, Octotel - reads Openserve's experience as a signal either way about whether direct retail is worth the reputational cost.

Ispa's own February 2026 satisfaction survey rated Openserve 6.5 out of 10 on "open-access adherence," measured across the widest pool of ISPs of any network surveyed. That score is the real thing Openserve has at stake here beyond any regulatory outcome: it's the network every reseller's experience gets compared against, and a dispute like this one - regardless of how it's ultimately resolved - is exactly the kind of story that shows up in the next survey wave if it isn't settled convincingly.

None of this dispute changes what's actually on offer today, so the practical guidance from our original coverage still holds. Openserve ISP's entry package is worth comparing on the numbers - R345 a month, no contract, free modem and free install - alongside quotes from established resellers on the same network, provided coverage and support match what's promised. Use our fibre coverage map to confirm Openserve actually passes your address before comparing prices.

Don't assume the packages priced above R499 are automatically the best deal simply because they carry the same free-router-and-install bundle as the R345 tier - WAPA's critique is a useful reminder to compare the effective monthly cost over a full year, not just the headline freebies, especially since a month-to-month contract lets you switch again quickly if a better offer appears while this dispute plays out.

And if support responsiveness or fault-repair speed matters to you as much as price, this is worth watching over the coming months rather than treating as settled either way: a reseller that starts losing provisioning priority or repair turnaround to Openserve's own retail arm has both the motive and, per Ispa's members, plausible grounds to say so publicly - and we'll update this story as that plays out. See our full comparison of Openserve fibre deals from every major reseller to see how the current pricing actually stacks up.

A short checklist for anyone comparing Openserve ISP against an existing reseller right now:

• Confirm coverage first. Openserve ISP is only relevant if you're within its 1.5-million-home footprint - check your address on our fibre coverage map before comparing anything else.
• Compare 12-month effective cost, not just the sign-up freebies. A free router and waived install matter less over a year than a R100/month gap in the recurring price, especially on the mid-tier packages where Openserve ISP's pricing isn't obviously cheaper than established resellers.
• Ask any reseller you're considering directly whether they'll match Openserve ISP's terms. Several already offer comparable no-contract, free-install deals - it's worth checking current promotions rather than assuming Openserve ISP's launch has automatically repriced the whole market.
• Weigh support history, not just price. An established reseller with years of support-quality track record may be worth a small premium over an unproven retail arm, particularly while the provisioning-priority question raised by Ispa's members remains unresolved.