Africa's broadband infrastructure has quietly crossed a real milestone: terrestrial fibre routes across the continent now add up to roughly 2.1 million kilometres, with around 1.3 million kilometres of that actively lit and carrying traffic. Last-mile fibre alone now passes more than 18 million homes and businesses. That's a meaningfully different starting point for ISPs than even a few years ago.
Fibre-to-the-home is finally scaling, not just piloting
For years, FTTH in much of Africa was concentrated in a handful of upscale urban estates. That's changing. Fixed broadband subscriptions are growing at double-digit rates in several markets as fibre deployments expand beyond the earliest, most obvious neighbourhoods — and forecasts suggest fibre and fixed wireless access together could account for close to two-thirds of all fixed broadband connections across the continent within the next couple of years.
Fixed wireless access is the pragmatic middle ground
Trenching fibre is expensive and slow, especially outside dense urban cores. Fixed wireless access — increasingly built on 5G spectrum — has become the practical way to light up a neighbourhood or business park in weeks rather than months. South Africa's market is a useful bellwether here: fibre-to-the-home and fibre-to-the-business connections climbed sharply over the past year, but 5G FWA growth has been just as aggressive, and the two are increasingly complementary rather than competing head-on.
The backhaul bottleneck is the real constraint
Where fibre ends and capacity runs thin is still the honest bottleneck for a lot of African ISPs. Submarine cable landings have improved international capacity dramatically, but getting that capacity from the coast to a town three hours inland — the middle-mile — remains expensive and, in places, genuinely scarce. This is part of why fixed wireless keeps winning ground: it can leapfrog the middle-mile problem in ways trenched fibre can't, at least not on the same timeline.
What it means for ISPs choosing where to build
- Dense, high-value urban areas still justify fibre — higher upfront cost, but better long-run margins and reliability.
- Growing suburban and peri-urban areas are increasingly a fixed wireless first, fibre-later play — get revenue flowing fast, then trench once density justifies it.
- Regardless of the access technology, the billing and RADIUS layer underneath needs to be the same: automated, MikroTik-compatible, and able to handle both PPPoE subscribers and prepaid vouchers from one dashboard.
That last point is exactly where a platform like XpressRADIUS fits — it doesn't care whether a client is connecting over fibre or a wireless access point, only that the RADIUS authentication and billing logic behind it stays consistent as the network grows.
Building out fibre, wireless, or both? See how XpressRADIUS handles billing for mixed-technology networks.
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