Openserve's CEO Says Its New ISP Will Close a 722,000-Home Connectivity Gap

In an interview published by Business Day on 8 August 2026, Telkom Group CEO Serame Taukobong gave the clearest public statement yet of why Openserve launched its own retail ISP: to chase down the gap between homes its fibre network already reaches and homes that have actually signed up. "That's a key focus of this ISP," Taukobong said. "It is something not totally different to what other operators are doing."

He put a number on it too: "One of the key focus areas we've set for Openserve is we need to get our connectivity rate from 53% to 60%." Telkom's own Q1 FY2027 trading update, published five days earlier on 3 August, puts the precise figure at 53.9% - 843,563 homes connected out of 1,565,750 passed, leaving roughly 722,000 homes that have fibre available at the pavement but no active connection.

Today's comments don't stand alone - they're the latest step in a dispute FastestFibre has been tracking since Openserve's ISP first went live. Here's the sequence, each step sourced to the same-day reporting:

Read the full detail on the launch and the rebuttal in our earlier coverage: Openserve Just Became Its Own Competitor and Openserve Fires Back in the Fibre ISP Row.

Today's interview restates Openserve's side of an argument that was already open. Nothing here is a rebuttal or a resolution - it's worth laying the two positions side by side as they stand right now:

Openserve ISP's own uncapped range runs R345 to R1,449 a month, per TechCentral's 13 July report on the launch - but that report didn't publish a tier-by-tier breakdown, and Openserve hasn't disclosed one publicly, so we can't map its price list speed by speed. What we can do is show what resellers on the same Openserve network already charge today, pulled live from FastestFibre's own tracked catalogue - the cheapest price at each speed tier, across every reseller ISP we track:

The entry end is the clearest read: R345 undercuts every reseller's cheapest Openserve package in our catalogue by a wide margin, which is exactly the kind of gap ISPA's members flagged when the ISP launched. At the top end, R1,449 sits inside the range resellers already charge for their fastest Openserve packages - not obviously predatory on its own, but the comparison only works one speed tier at a time, and Openserve hasn't given us the tiers to check it properly.

Three things would move this story forward: Openserve publishing a tier-by-tier retail price list so its own ISP can be compared speed-for-speed against resellers; ISPA confirming whether it has escalated to competition authorities, as it said in July it might; or Openserve agreeing to the independently audited transfer-pricing undertaking Easttel's Mark Gray called for. We'll update this article, or publish a follow-up, on whichever of those happens first.

Openserve's CEO used a Business Day interview to put a public number on why the company's three-week-old retail ISP exists: closing a roughly 722,000-home gap between homes passed and homes connected, and lifting connectivity from 53.9% to 60%. That's a real, verified figure from Telkom's own trading update - but it's also Openserve's own framing of a strategy that wholesale partners are still disputing on fairness grounds, and today's interview doesn't add anything new to that side of the argument.

If you're in the target group - fibre already passes your home and you haven't connected - the practical move is the same regardless of how the dispute resolves: compare the actual monthly price at your speed tier across Openserve ISP and the resellers on the same network, using real numbers rather than headline freebies.