Fibertime Group, the pay-as-you-go fibre provider with roots in Kayamandi, Stellenbosch, is targeting more South African townships, with its next destination being Mamelodi.
To scale up the business, it plans to list the company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in a bid to raise capital.
This is according to Alan Knott-Craig Jr, founder of Fibertime, in an interview with ITWeb TV, during which he also discussed the challenges and dangers he faced in his bid to connect South African townships.
Knott-Craig Jr is a prominent South African entrepreneur, author and advocate for digital inclusion, known for his efforts to expand internet access in underserved communities across the country.
He is the son of Alan Knott-Craig Sr, a notable figure in South Africa’s telecommunications industry, having served as CEO of both Vodacom and Cell C.
Knott-Craig Jr’s entrepreneurial journey began in 2003 with the founding of Cellfind, one of SA’s first mobile location-based service providers. He served as CEO until 2005. In 2006, he became CEO of iBurst, building one of SA’s largest wireless broadband networks.
After relocating to Stellenbosch in 2009, he founded World of Avatar in 2010, an investment house for mobile applications in Africa. Through this venture, he acquired and became CEO of Mxit, Africa’s largest social network at the time. He left Mxit and World of Avatar in 2012.
In 2013, he founded Project Isizwe, a non-profit company managing the deployment of the largest public free WiFi network in the country. The following year, he established Herotel, aiming to consolidate wireless internet service providers and expand broadband access in rural areas.
In 2022, he launched Fibertime, a company delivering pay-as-you-go fibre internet to township communities, with a model offering 100Mbps uncapped internet for R5 per day.
During the interview, Knott-Craig Jr detailed the mistakes he made in some of the businesses he was involved in and how he learnt from these to build successful enterprises.
No easy feat
Three weeks after he sold out of Herotel, he decided to start Fibertime to provide fibre internet to the townships.
“With Fibertime, for R5 per day, you can get uncapped 100Mbps internet. It’s pay-as-you-go and if you pay everyday it’s R150 per month. It’s 85% cheaper. The company was built from the idea that there are lots of people living in the townships and we could make money out of the numbers.
“We started in April 2022 and the idea was to go to the townships and connect every household with a free router. We had lots of problems and challenges when we started because no one had ever done that before in South Africa. Building infrastructure in townships is not easy because of construction mafias, shack fires and protection rackets.”
He added the Fibertime has connected 8 000 homes in Alex, one of SA’s most densely populated townships.
“There are over 13 million people living in South African townships, so that’s a very huge market. The traditional fibre industry has created about R40 billion or R50 billion worth of value in 12 years and yet they have only connected two million homes. So, what we are looking to do, is to unlock 80% of the market, not only the leafy suburbs.
“From last year, we started scaling out of Kayamandi. We are now looking to connect Mamelodi. We have got 700 000 homes of work in progress and that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to the 13 million homes out there.”
He revealed that so far, Fibertime has connected 97 000 homes and the target is to reach 100 000 next week.
“We can connect from 700 to 800 homes in a day and we are not just passing homes but connecting homes.”
According to Knott-Craig Jr, in future there are plans to list Fibertime in order to scale the business.
“We will reach to a point where we will need big institutional backers and we may even be listed one day. Telecoms is about capital; you can’t really get big unless you have access to large amounts of capital, which probably means listing one day.”
Formative lessons
“My first business was Cellfind, which was involved in cellphone tracking. Then I was involved in World of Avatar, which bought Mxit. I had a big business called Herotel, which we sold to Vumatel a couple of years ago,” he said.
“I have been involved in a couple of businesses and probably lost more money than the businesses that made money, but I learnt a lot along the way about getting ahead in telecoms.”
Knott-Craig Jr said of all the companies he has been involved in, he still has fond memories of Mxit, a free instant messaging application developed in SA that ran on over 8 000 devices, including feature phones, Symbian S60, Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone and tablets.
According to a study by consultancy World Wide Worx, Mxit had 7.4 million monthly active subscribers in July 2013, of which 6.3 million were South Africans.
The company announced its closure in a statement in 2015, and all of its intellectual property and technology assets were donated to The Reach Trust, an independent public benefit organisation.
“Mixit was a big one. We inherited something beautiful there. People still talk about Mxit even today. It’s apity that I messed it up, but I learnt a lot of lessons out of all that. We bought Mxit in 2011 and we knew there were some problems. We knew that it needed a smartphone refresh and a new business model. We knew that WhatsApp was coming and I messed up a whole lot of things.”
He pointed out that the biggest mistake was on strategy. “We tried to position ourselves as an alternative to WhatsApp, and making ourselves [go] head-to-head with a giant American company, which in retrospective was very stupid. It shows how incompetent I was at the time.
“If you want to build a business in South Africa, try to make something that doesn’t go head-to-head with something from America. Maybe if we had picked something like a dating platform, we would have had more time to entrench ourselves to more effect. My partners ran out of patience and I was eventually kicked out.”
He also revealed the biggest lessons that he learnt from his father. “I used his name shamelessly in my life. I am in telecoms because of him. My dad believed that cellphones would change people’s lives, and they did.”
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