Vox on Frogfoot: the advert against the year

Sort our Frogfoot 120/120 Mbps table by advertised monthly price and Vox is at the top: R675/mo against R699 from RSAweb, the lowest of five sellers of the identical line. It is also the only tier on the network where Vox is top of that list.

Cost the same twelve months all in — promo months at the promo rate, the balance at the standing rate, each seller’s own published once-off added — and Vox is 3rd of five at R11 120, behind RSAweb at R10 898 and Webafrica at R10 917. That is R222 more for the same trench, the same ONT and the same speed pair, off an advertised gap of R24/mo in Vox’s favour.

The mechanism is in one column. Vox discounts this line by R310/mo for three months and then bills R985 — a step-up of 45.9% on what you had been paying. RSAweb steps up too, by R226/mo after two, and neither does Webafrica. The crossover is computable: Vox is ahead on cumulative spend for the first 8 months and behind from month 9 onwards.

Read the second and seventh columns together and the whole argument of this site is in one table: the ordering of one is not the ordering of the other. RSAweb advertises R699 — R24 more than Vox — and ends the year R222 cheaper. A reader picking the top row off a price-sorted table on this tier is picking the deepest discount, not the cheapest line.

Vox runs a promotional rate on all ten Frogfoot tiers, and the window is the same on every one of them: three months, counted from the date the service goes active rather than from the order. What is not uniform is the depth. The two bottom rungs step up by 9.3% and 9.4%; seven of the ten step up by more than 45%, topping out at 49.4% on 400/200 Mbps. In rand the jump runs from R58/mo to R420/mo.

The gap between the second column and the eighth is what a household should be budgeting against. 120/60 Mbps advertises at R610 and averages R839/mo across the first year once the step-up and the once-off are both in it. Twelve times the advertised price understates the real first year by R2 750, and on 400/200 Mbps — the steepest step on the ladder — it understates it by R4 010.

Why this reorders the whole network and not just Vox

A promo only changes a ranking if the sellers beside you are not running the same one. On Frogfoot they are not, and the spread is wide enough to decide the table.

Afrihost runs no promo on any Frogfoot tier. Its advertised price looks uncompetitive beside a discount and is simply what the line costs in month one and in month thirty-six. Webafrica discount 1 of 10 tiers, so for most of its ladder the same is true. That asymmetry is the entire reason the two rankings part company, and they part company on 10 of the 10 contested tiers between the advert and twelve months of recurring charges, and on 9 of 10 once the once-off is counted too. On 6 tiers it changes which ISP is cheapest outright.

It also does something odd inside Vox’s own ladder. Because the discount is deep at the top and shallow at the bottom, Vox’s 120/60 Mbps advertises R117/mo below its own 60/60 Mbps for 2.0x the download. We checked every pair on the network for this rather than the two somebody noticed, and not one of the eight cases survives the promo: on the standing rate and over twelve months the faster line is the dearer one every time — Vox’s 120/60 Mbps ends the year R504 above its own 60/60 Mbps. An inversion that unwinds is not a buying instruction, which is why it is stated here and not recommended.

The figure below ranks the whole Frogfoot pool twice over — as advertised, and as it actually bills with the step-up and the once-off included — so the rows that move are visible at a glance.

Frogfoot is open access, so on any tier two sellers both list, the fibre, the ONT and the trench are identical and the only variables are price, contract and support. Five ISPs we track resell Frogfoot — Afrihost, MWeb, RSAweb, Vox and Webafrica — across 10 speed pairs, and Vox competes on 10 of them, which is all of them: there is no Frogfoot tier in our catalogue that another ISP sells and Vox does not.

Three things in that table are worth saying in words. Vox’s position moves on 9 of the 10 tiers between the advert and the costed year. On 6 tiers the cheapest seller itself changes — 60/30 Mbps from Webafrica to Afrihost, 60/60 Mbps from MWeb to Vox, 120/120 Mbps from Vox to RSAweb, 240/240 Mbps from RSAweb to Webafrica, 1000/500 Mbps from RSAweb to Webafrica and 1000/1000 Mbps from RSAweb to Webafrica. And the direction is not random: Vox improves where its promo is shallow and its once-off is low relative to the field, and falls where the step-up is steep.

Put a number on the whole ladder rather than one tier. Vox is cheapest all in on 60/60 Mbps. Across the other 9 contested tiers it costs a median of R352 more than the cheapest seller over twelve months, and R6 355 summed across all 10. For context, the spread between the cheapest and the dearest seller on a single tier reaches R2 910 over the same year, so the seller matters more here than the tier does.

The once-off, which nobody advertises

A twelve-month recurring total always adds up from the monthly rates printed beside it, which is why the middle column above exists. The all-in column needs one more number, and on most networks at least one seller publishes none at all — folding a guess in would flatter it. Frogfoot is the exception: all 50 monthly rows state a figure, so this is one of the few networks on this site where an all-in comparison is apples to apples.

Afrihost states a zero installation charge on Frogfoot where Vox publishes R230, and that single charge is worth more than several months of the monthly difference on a cheap entry line — which is exactly what it does at 60/30 Mbps, where Afrihost takes the year despite advertising R88 more than the cheapest advert on the tier.

Twelve months is the window most households budget against, but a fibre line routinely runs longer, and over twenty-four the promotional leg stops mattering: the standing rate is nearly the whole bill and the once-off halves in per-month terms. Vox holds the same two tiers over twenty-four months that it holds over twelve, and ten tiers still reorder between the advert and the longer horizon. The worst single case over two years is 1000/1000 Mbps, where Webafrica costs R35 976 against Vox’s R43 080 — R7 104 more, off an advertised gap of R306/mo. That is the gigabit flip our MWeb on Frogfoot page leads with from the other side of the same pool; it is context here rather than this page’s own finding.

The two figures below take the same Frogfoot pool and ask the questions a per-tier table cannot: what the identical line costs from the cheapest and the dearest seller on each tier, and how each ISP places across the ladder as a whole.

Frogfoot Air is Frogfoot’s fixed-wireless product for addresses the trench has not reached. It is not a slower fibre tier and it should not be compared with one: our catalogue holds it at one speed pair — 25/10 Mbps — from four ISPs, one fewer than sell Frogfoot itself.

Here Vox’s position is the opposite of its position on Frogfoot, and for a reason the table makes plain: it runs no promotional rate on this line at all, so there is no step-up to lose it the year, and it publishes R0 (stated) where MWeb charges R250. It is cheapest of four on the advert at R435 and cheapest all in over twelve months at R5 220 — the only Frogfoot contest on this page where the two rankings agree about Vox.

Two cautions before you read that as a recommendation. The first is unit price: Frogfoot Air at R435 works out to R17.40/Mbps against R1.11/Mbps on Vox’s best Frogfoot rung — 15.6x dearer per megabit, which is the price of not having a trench. The second is that a fixed-wireless line is a different service with different contention; it is the right buy where it is the only buy. Our Frogfoot coverage map is where to establish which of the two you are being offered, and Afrihost on Frogfoot Air covers the next cheapest seller of the same line.

This is the part a reader is most likely to get wrong, and it is worth being blunt about. Frogfoot is the residential fibre arm of the Vox group — our own Frogfoot fibre deals and Frogfoot network pages both say so — and it is run as an open-access wholesale network with five ISPs reselling on top of it at their own retail prices. Common ownership buys Vox no wholesale advantage that reaches the rate card: it has the cheapest advertised price on 1 of 10 tiers and the cheapest costed year on 1 of 10, and those are different tiers — 120/120 Mbps on the advert, 60/60 Mbps over the year.

What ownership does buy is reach. Frogfoot passed 406 000 homes and had 169 000 connected as at Jun 2025 (TeleGeography) — a 41.6% uptake rate, on the 5th largest footprint of the 8 networks we track, behind Vumatel, Openserve, Herotel and MetroFibre. It is also one of very few SA networks selling a fixed-wireless product alongside the fibre, which is what puts Frogfoot Air in the table above at all. A mid-sized national footprint with a wireless overlay is a genuinely different proposition from a metro-dense fibre-only build, and it is the reason to care which network reached your street before you care which ISP bills you.

On quality rather than size, ISPA’s own February 2026 survey of the networks — 406 ratings from 45 member ISPs across 11 metrics — scores Frogfoot 6.1, up +0.5 on the previous round, which places it 5th of the 8 networks classed as major — level with Liquid Intelligent Tech, against a survey average of 6.2 and 7.5 for the best-rated major, Octotel. Read it for what it is: the ISPs who install and support on the network rating the network, not a customer poll. The direction of travel matters more than the absolute here — it is 19% below the leader and above Link Africa, Dark Fibre Africa and Vumatel.

The wholesale increase underneath every price on this page

Frogfoot is the only network in our price-change record that published a full per-tier rate card for its 2026 move, which makes it the richest price history on this site: ten tiers, all effective 1 Feb 2026, averaging 5.4%. The increase was far from flat — 240/120 Mbps rose 13.1% while 1000/1000 Mbps rose 1.7%, and the two gigabit tiers converged on a single wholesale rate. That is a wholesale figure and not a retail one, so it reached Afrihost, MWeb, RSAweb, Vox and Webafrica alike rather than any one of them.

The practical consequence for this page is simple and worth stating rather than leaving implied: a wholesale increase reaches every reseller eventually, so the twelve- and twenty-four-month totals above are what today’s rate card produces, not a promise about next year’s. The full tier-by-tier record across every network is in our 2026 SA fibre price-increase timeline, and Frogfoot and Vox’s township fibre push covers where the group is spending the build budget next.

On the ISP side rather than the network side, Vox scored 68.6% satisfaction in MyBroadband’s Q1 2026 analysis of ~1 million speed tests, 4 of 12 ISPs measured — below Afrihost at 72.7%, MWeb at 72.6% and Webafrica at 70.1%. That is the honest shape of the support argument on this network: Vox is not the best-regarded seller of the line it is asking a premium for. Where a reputation does justify paying more, our ISP rankings set out what the measured scores actually are.