Vuyani Jarana’s Ilitha Telecommunications is pushing forward with its aim to connect 500,000 low-income homes in South Africa with fibre-based internet access, with close to R1bn raised in less than two years.
Founded in 2019, Ilitha is a fibre network operator that primarily focuses on deploying fibre in townships, peri-urban and rural areas across South Africa.
This week, the company completed a rollout in Mthatha, connecting 10,000 homes. Ilitha said it has now connected homes across 27 communities in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
The company offers flexible, pay-as-you-go broadband internet plans for as low as R3 a day or R90 a month, using fibre to the home and on-the-go Wi-Fi from hotspots rolled out in the area.
In late August, the company secured R500m from Absa Corporate and Investment Banking to “accelerate the expansion of affordable fibre connectivity across South Africa’s township economies”.
While affordability is key, the internet use case has a big effect on adoption and usage. What drives usage and adoption is the sense of value
— Vuyani Jarana, Ilitha Telecommunications CEO
According to Jarana, “We have spent the past 18 months proving that this model works. The next phase is about taking what we have learnt and scaling it responsibly.”
Funds from Absa add to the company’s already sizable fundraising effort from last year. In February 2025 Ilitha raised more than R400m in debt and equity. Equity amounted to R120m, while debt made up the bulk of the funding package at R300m.
Ilitha’s main investor in that round was France-based company Meridiam, which specialises in developing, financing and the long-term management of public infrastructure in three sectors: mobility, public services and low-carbon solutions.
At the time, Jarana, a former SAA and Vodacom executive, told Business Day: “It’s a tiered approach, starting initially with equity contributions and shareholder loans. It’s about R420m initially, before we go out and raise debt in the open market. This will cover our rollout in the first year.”
Rolling out fibre, and telecoms infrastructure in general, is notoriously capital intensive. Across the world, and perhaps more starkly in Africa, rural areas tend to have low network coverage levels as telecom operators avoid investing in them because of the expense.
Providers would rather invest in towns and cities with big populations that are major consumers of communications services. This is one of the main reasons for the explosion in the adoption of low-Earth-orbiting satellite services such as Starlink and Eutelsat OneWeb.
We didn’t start by building a conventional network in an established urban neighbourhood and then ask how to make it work in townships. We started in these communities, and our model has been shaped by what we have learnt on the ground about how people live and use connectivity
— Jarana
“While affordability is key, the internet use case has a big effect on adoption and usage,” Jarana said. “What drives usage and adoption is the sense of value.”
Depending on the package, Ilitha’s network can support between 200 megabits per second (Mbps) and 300 Mbps of capacity for up to 15 devices, with up to 20 Mbps allocated per device.
Jarana argues that this gives households “considerably more” usable capacity than a conventional shared connection, where multiple devices may compete for the same bandwidth.
Ilitha has found differences between established townships, where housing density can be high, and more self-built areas where larger yards and different settlement patterns can change the economics of reaching each home. This is an area where the company believes its experience of operating in township and peri-urban markets gives it a different perspective from providers approaching the market as a new frontier.
“We didn’t start by building a conventional network in an established urban neighbourhood and then ask how to make it work in townships. We started in these communities, and our model has been shaped by what we have learnt on the ground about how people live and use connectivity,” Jarana added.
Business Day
Mudiwa Gavaza
www.timeslive.co.za