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Frogfoot plans to keep buying smaller fibre network operators in South Africa’s suburbs as the market consolidates, but CEO Shane Chorley stopped short of ruling out a sale of the business.

“I’d be ignorant to say that we would ignore any offer,” Chorley said on the latest episode of the TechCentral Show – watch or listen below. “I would hope to say that we will be the acquirer rather than being sold.”

Frogfoot has already bought a couple of small suburban operators and wants to acquire “as many of those smaller operators as possible”, he told show host Duncan McLeod. He expects somewhat larger networks, of more than 30 000 homes, to come up for sale in the next few years, followed in time by “a much bigger consolidation of one or two of the bigger ones”.

The mooted merger of Octotel and MetroFibre had been “going on for a while”, Chorley said, and he expected consolidation among suburban operators to continue.

Abraham van der Merwe, who leads Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa, said consolidation was inevitable because “infrastructure requires scale”. But he said Frogfoot was unlikely to be consolidated any time soon because its “long-term and patient” investors, among them the founders, intend to own the business for a very long time.

The two spoke after a DNI-led consortium invested in the businesses in a deal valuing them at R14.4-billion. Most of the money will go into townships, where Van der Merwe said fewer than two million of 12 million to 15 million homes have fibre. Frogfoot wants to lift its build rate from about 80 000 connections a year to 360 000.

That untapped market is also why Van der Merwe is not worried about operators overbuilding each other. Overbuilding splits market share and wrecks the economics, he said, and there is little reason to do it when so many homes have no fibre at all. It took about a decade to connect the 4.5 million homes in the suburbs; the township market is three times that size. TechCentral

Mohamed Sami, group chief information officer at Vodacom, says autonomous AI agents that resolve customer problems without handing them to a human are the next big shift in customer experience – and that it is closer than many think.

Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Sami said Vodacom’s chatbots and voice bots already handle a considerable share of customer calls, while AI tools help its human agents find information without jumping between systems.

“When I say it is the next big thing, it is not something that is happening in years. It’s something that is happening very soon,” he said. How autonomous those agents become, he added, depends on how much intelligence and orchestration sits behind them.

Watch the episode

Sami also discusses:

• Where the line falls between his role and that of the group CTO as network and IT converge;

• Why Vodacom is using small language models to help large models handle isiZulu, Swahili, Amharic and Egypt’s Arabic dialects;

• How a standard set of AI agents across the software development life cycle is lifting developer productivity, and why it hasn’t cost software engineers their jobs;

• How Vodacom is trying to stop AI token bills running away, including orchestrators that route work between expensive, cheap and self-hosted models;

• Why he told the board that cybersecurity is one of the company’s biggest risks, and the programme to rebuild core platforms designed before the generative AI era; and

• What it takes to be a modern CIO, and his advice for a graduate who wants his job in 20 years.

Don’t miss a great discussion on technology in telecoms. TechCentral

Chinese companies have built their position in African technology one layer at a time – first phones and telecoms equipment, then fintech and now the AI models that local start-ups build on. American private capital, meanwhile, is pulling back. Lexi Novitske, general partner at Norrsken22, thinks US investors will regret it.

Novitske moved to Nigeria in 2012 and has invested from Lagos ever since. Norrsken22, a pan-African growth fund backed by Nordic tech founders including those behind Klarna, Skype and Minecraft, closed its debut fund at US$205-million in 2023. It is now about halfway through deploying that capital, with no exits yet.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, she expands on the argument TechCentral reported last week: that African start-ups are increasingly building on Chinese AI models such as Alibaba’s Qwen because they are cheaper and more available, and that the US risks losing both a young, digital-first market and access to its data.

In the interview, with TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod, Novitske also discusses:

• How Nigeria’s start-up scene has changed since she began as an angel investor;

• Why unpredictable regulation and a shortage of top talent are bigger obstacles for Nigerian founders than power cuts;

• How Chinese-backed OPay and PalmPay won Nigerian fintech by absorbing years of losses, and why that now makes regulators uneasy;

• Why Silicon Valley’s AI boom has drawn venture capital away from Africa, and when she expects it to return;

• Why Egypt and South Africa offer the best opportunities right now, with Nigeria likely to follow; and

• What Optasia’s oversubscribed JSE listing means for Johannesburg, why the biggest African fintechs are looking to New York, London and Hong Kong instead, and why one or two winners can return an entire fund.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

AI agents are no longer a thought experiment for security teams. They are breaking out of test environments, hacking real companies and, according to one of our guests, already going rogue inside large businesses.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show, TechCentral deputy editor Fanie van Rooyen talks to Dominic White, MD for South Africa at Orange Cyberdefense, and Adam Ely, GM of AI security at Check Point, about the escalating threat AI poses to cybersecurity.

They unpack the incident in which OpenAI’s own agents escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face’s systems. White argues the initial breach was far from sophisticated and questions whether OpenAI understands its duty of care. Ely explains why the incident shows that even highly skilled, well-resourced teams can’t rule out agents going rogue.

They also take on the widely reported story that three Hacktron researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to take over OpenAI employees’ accounts – a story White calls “deliberately misleading”.

Also discussed:

• A Check Point customer running 50 000 AI agents – and what happens when they drift

• Why sandboxing and human oversight are struggling to keep up

• Why even security professionals end up switching off their own agents’ safeguards

• The case for monitoring agents from the inside, in real time

• Whether AI development can – or should – slow down

• Who is accountable when an agent breaks the rules

• The Manhattan Project comparison both guests reach for

• What they expect to see in the next 12 months

Whether you run a security team, build with AI or simply want to understand where the technology is heading, this is a frank conversation with two practitioners who see the threat from all sides. TechCentral

Octotel CEO Trevor van Zyl joins the TechCentral Show to talk about where South Africa’s fibre market goes next – including a potential merger with MetroFibre Networx. Van Zyl told TechCentral that Octotel and MetroFibre Networx are assessing a combination that would create the country’s third-largest fibre network operator, with both companies sitting under a common investor in an AIIM-led consortium.

In the interview, he sets out Octotel’s position: just under 400 000 homes passed across the Cape Town metropole, the West Coast and the Garden Route; a balance sheet he says lets the company deploy capital when and where it chooses; and a Western Cape footprint he argues overlaps very little with MetroFibre’s.

He discusses the next phase of roll-out, too. As networks push into lower-LSM areas, “the commercials and the economics start changing”, he says, and affordability now reaches well into the middle class.

He rejects the idea that fixed-wireless access can substitute for fibre in dense settlements – wireless has improved dramatically, he says, “but when you look at the actual demand case and what is required in those environments, it absolutely has to be fibre”. The more important question, in his view, is how to distribute it economically once you get there.

On Openserve’s move into the ISP business, Van Zyl is relaxed. He says he understands why Openserve did it, but that Octotel will not follow: “We certainly don’t want to become an ISP. We’re not good at being an ISP.”

He also expects consolidation among ISPs as networks saturate, sees low-Earth orbit satellite as complementary to fibre rather than a threat to it, and will not rule Octotel out of any future move by MTN on fibre network assets.

Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral