What is ADSL?
ADSL is the copper-cable internet service that powered South African homes for two decades. Here's how it worked, why Telkom is switching it off, and what's replacing it.
ADSL in plain English
ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) delivers internet over the copper telephone cables that already run to most older South African homes. It's "asymmetric" because download is much faster than upload - typically 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up at the top tier Telkom ever sold to residential customers.
From around 2002 until the late 2010s, ADSL was the default home-internet connection in South Africa. It rode on Telkom's national copper voice network: the same pair of wires that carried your landline phone also carried your internet, separated by a small splitter at the wall socket. You bought a Telkom line rental every month, then bought a separate "data" account from an ISP (Afrihost, Webafrica, Mweb, Axxess and so on) that resold capacity over Telkom's IP Connect (IPC) wholesale pipe.
As of 2026, Telkom has switched off the bulk of its ADSL footprint. The lines that remain are mostly in pockets where fibre and LTE-A coverage are still rolling out, and Telkom is actively migrating those customers off copper.
How ADSL works on Telkom copper
Your house copper pair runs back to a local Telkom exchange, where a piece of equipment called a DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) translates the analogue copper signal into IP traffic and hands it off onto Telkom's national backbone. Each exchange serves a fixed catchment - usually a suburb or two - and every house in that catchment shares the DSLAM at the end of its copper.
Three things made ADSL fragile, and they're all worth knowing if you're still on a copper line:
- Distance from the exchange. ADSL2+ is theoretically capable of ~24 Mbps but only within a few hundred metres of the DSLAM. Most SA homes were 1-3 km from their exchange, which capped real-world speeds at 4-10 Mbps even on the "10 Mbps" product.
- Weather and line condition. Wet weather, oxidised joints, and ageing insulation all degraded copper. SA's mix of heavy summer rain and long-installed copper meant most lines lost speed over time.
- Shared contention. The ISP bought a "shaped" pipe from Telkom IPC and divided it across all its customers in your area. Peak-hour congestion was the norm; "unshaped" packages cost meaningfully more.
A good fibre connection has none of these failure modes - the optical signal isn't attenuated by distance in the same way, it's immune to weather, and you get a committed bandwidth profile per port.
The Telkom ADSL switch-off
Telkom began publicly signalling the end of ADSL in 2019, when it filed with ICASA to migrate IPC customers onto its newer IP Stream and SmartBroadband products. The phase-out then ran in waves:
- 2019 - 2020: Telkom stopped accepting new ADSL line orders in most metros. Existing customers stayed on, but the message was clear.
- 2020 - 2022: Exchange-by-exchange decommissioning, focused on high-density metro areas where Openserve fibre had been built ahead of the copper retirement.
- 2022 - 2024: Ramp-up of customer migration letters. Most retail ISPs (Afrihost, Webafrica, Mweb, Axxess) stopped selling new ADSL accounts in this window because Telkom would no longer provision the underlying line.
- 2024 onwards: Telkom focused on closing the long-tail of uneconomic exchanges, particularly rural and peri-urban areas where copper had been heavily affected by theft.
MyBroadband, ITWeb and BusinessTech have tracked each wave; the public-record pattern matches the experience of most households we hear from. If your line was already shaky, you probably got the migration notice early.
What replaced ADSL on each pathway
Telkom didn't migrate every ADSL customer to fibre. Where the copper was being pulled out, the customer was offered one of three replacements, depending on what infrastructure had been built to the address:
- Openserve fibre. If Openserve had built fibre past the home, the migration was the cleanest - same address, same telephone number can be ported via VoIP, and the new line is sold by any ISP on the Openserve open-access network (Webafrica, Afrihost, Telkom, Mweb, Vox, RSAWEB).
- Telkom SmartBroadband / LTE-Advanced. Where fibre wasn't yet at the address, Telkom moved the customer onto fixed-wireless via its 4G/5G mobile network using a router (e.g. Huawei B535 / B628) supplied with the contract. This is now the most common "rural and peri-urban" replacement.
- Mobile data on Rain, MTN or Vodacom. A meaningful chunk of ex-ADSL customers churned away from Telkom entirely - Rain's R599 5G uncapped plan and MTN's home internet products picked up the customers Telkom couldn't serve. In Cape Town in particular, the move was often direct from ADSL to 5G, bypassing fibre.
ADSL "Self-Provided" customers - households on legacy IP Connect resale who never had a Telkom-branded retail account - were notified by their ISP rather than Telkom directly. Those ISPs typically offered a same-brand fibre migration where coverage existed, otherwise an LTE bridging service.
ADSL vs fibre side-by-side
- Speed. Top-tier ADSL was 10 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up. Entry fibre starts at 20/10 Mbps for around R299/m uncapped - twice the speed for less money, even before symmetric upload.
- Upload. ADSL upload was capped at ~1 Mbps. Most SA fibre packages are symmetric or near-symmetric (e.g. 100/100, 200/200), which is what makes video calling, cloud backups and live streaming actually work from home.
- Latency. ADSL ping was 30-60 ms to a Johannesburg test server on a clean line, often 100 ms+ in peak hour. Fibre is typically 5-15 ms with much lower jitter.
- Reliability. Copper degrades with weather, age and theft. Fibre is immune to weather and electromagnetic interference; the only real failure mode is a physical break, which is rare on properly buried networks.
- Price. ADSL's last-decade pricing put a basic 4 Mbps line at R299-R399/month before ISP data on top. Today, R299/month buys uncapped fibre with no separate line rental, and deals at every speed tier come with free installation and free Wi-Fi routers.
- Bundling. ADSL needed a separate Telkom line rental plus an ISP data account. Fibre is one bill: one ISP, one router, one debit order.
Copper theft and rural pockets
Copper theft accelerated the switch-off more than any other factor. By 2022, large parts of Gauteng, the Eastern Cape and parts of KZN were experiencing repeat copper strip-outs - cables stolen one weekend, replaced the next, stolen again. Telkom's public position from late 2022 was that re-cabling stolen ADSL routes was no longer economically rational where mobile or fibre alternatives existed.
The practical consequence is geographic asymmetry. In Cape Town's CBD and dense Joburg suburbs, the ADSL switch-off was orderly: fibre had been built, customers got a 90-day migration window, the copper came out. In rural and peri-urban areas, the switch-off was reactive: copper was stolen, Telkom didn't repair, customers were moved to fixed-LTE if a tower was nearby, or churned to Rain, MTN or Vodacom.
If you're still on ADSL in 2026, you're almost certainly in the last category. Telkom's customer-care line (10210) can confirm whether your exchange has a fibre or fixed-LTE replacement built; if neither is available yet, our fibre in my area tool covers every major SA fibre network operator and can tell you within a few seconds whether anyone has built past your street.
How to migrate from ADSL to fibre
The process is well-trodden by now. In order:
- Check coverage at your address. Run our multi-network coverage check or the FNO coverage map. Most SA addresses are now passed by Openserve, Vumatel, Frogfoot, Octotel or one of the regional FNOs.
- Pick the network first, ISP second. The fibre network operator (FNO) sets the speed ceiling and the wholesale price. The ISP wraps it with support, billing and a router. See our SA fibre ISP reviews for a current ranking.
- Order. Installation is typically free at most ISPs in 2026, takes 5-10 working days on a new address and 24-72 hours on a previously activated line. You'll get an SMS the day before with an installer time slot.
- Don't cancel ADSL until the fibre is working. Most ISPs will run both lines in parallel for 5-7 days so you can confirm speeds and stability before you cut over. Once you're happy, cancel Telkom line rental and the ADSL account.
- Port your landline number if you want it. Most fibre ISPs offer a VoIP service (Webafrica HomePhone, Afrihost VoIP, Telkom's own VoIP product) that ports your existing 0xx landline number across, so neighbours, family members and old contacts can still reach you on the same digits.
If fibre isn't at your address yet
A small minority of SA addresses still don't have a fibre option - mostly rural smallholdings, lifestyle estates that opted out of the local rollout, and parts of the Northern Cape and Limpopo where the economics haven't yet supported a build. The realistic options are:
- 5G fixed-wireless. Rain (R599 uncapped on the entry tier), Vodacom Home 5G, MTN Home 5G. Coverage check is on each operator's site. See our 5G vs fibre comparison for the real-world performance gap.
- 4G/LTE fixed-wireless. Telkom SmartBroadband, MTN Made For Home, Cell C, Rain 4G. Slower than 5G but more widely available.
- Register interest with an FNO. Vumatel, Openserve and Frogfoot all publish "express interest" forms - if enough households in your area sign up, the FNO's build plan can be reprioritised.
- Starlink. Officially not available in SA as of mid-2026, although roaming kits exist in a grey-market sense. Not recommended as a primary home connection given the regulatory uncertainty.
Frequently asked questions
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