A Market Engineered for Stagnation

By 2012, broadband access in South Africa was constrained by legacy infrastructure, outdated business models, and institutional inertia.

Although the country had entered a phase of managed deregulation, the practical reality still reflected the logic of a monopoly. The former parastatal Telkom, while no longer state-owned in the strictest sense, retained full control of the country’s copper telephone network. This network, the only physical medium through which DSL transport services could be delivered, underpinned the national broadband landscape.

This copper “last mile”, more accurately referred to as the local loop, ran from the customer’s premises to a Telkom-operated exchange building. There, DSL signals were terminated at DSLAMs (DSL Access Multiplexers). That loop provided the Layer 2 transport, but the Internet Access component, the routing, authentication, and service definition, was something else entirely. That was the product layer that made DSL useful, and it was here that Telkom maintained its strongest grip.

The two concepts, DSL as a transport medium, and Internet Access as a routed service, were frequently conflated, largely by design. Telkom encouraged the confusion, fostering the perception that the only way to get "DSL Internet" was to buy it directly from them. In reality, they were separate services, and bundling them together served a strategic purpose: it discouraged competition.

Even after regulations forced Telkom to allow limited access to the DSL infrastructure, it did so on its own terms. The mechanism for this was a wholesale product called IPC (IPConnect), a high-capacity link that allowed ISPs to deliver their own Internet Access over Telkom-provided DSL lines.

But IPC was no act of generosity. It was a concession, wrestled from Telkom through years of regulatory and legal pressure. Its pricing model was opaque and prohibitively expensive for all but the largest players. And critically, all traffic traversed a Telkom-owned ATM backbone before reaching an ISP’s core. In effect, Telkom still controlled part of the service path, even when it wasn’t providing the service.

They also defined what technical features would be supported. Static IPs, custom routes (via RADIUS framed routes), and advanced authentication options were suppressed, not because they weren’t technically feasible, but because they made the product too useful. If DSL became too functional, it would threaten Telkom’s lucrative leased line business, where a 10 Mbps link might cost R800/month, but an equivalent E3 (34 Mbps) leased line could cost over R100,000/month.

Artificial constraints, installation delays, no service guarantees, selective price reductions through direct channels only, all of these were tools used to suppress competition and maintain margin.

This wasn’t a market. It was a containment zone. Smaller ISPs were locked out of control and differentiation. Mid-sized players were capped by economic limitations. And larger players spent huge sums on workarounds, all while Telkom remained both referee and competitor.

The result was a broadband market stuck in second gear. Growth lagged global benchmarks. Customer experience stagnated. And innovation was functionally blocked.

But beneath the surface, demand was building. Customers wanted more. ISPs wanted control. And the market, for all its frustration, was ready.

The Strategic Gap – and the Opportunity It Created

From the outside, South Africa had the semblance of a functioning wholesale DSL market. Telkom had a resale product. IPC offered limited separation. A handful of larger ISPs operated within the constraints.

But in truth, this wasn’t a market. It was a bottleneck. The rules were engineered to contain growth and protect incumbency.

Our strategic lens was simple: what if ISPs could define their own internet services the same way Telkom did, but without needing a national network, without burning millions on bespoke integration, and without playing legal chess for every step forward?

We weren’t trying to undercut Telkom. We were trying to change the rules of the game.

The vision was to build a platform that gave ISPs:

• Control over their own products.
• Independence in provisioning, pricing, and policy.
• Tools to differentiate and compete, not just resell.

And critically: the scale, support, and stability to do all of this at a level that matched or exceeded what larger incumbents could offer.

The aim wasn’t just to compete. It was to create a new market, then dominate it by design.

 

Designing for Autonomy – The Product That Let ISPs Compete

At the core of our product strategy was a simple premise: if ISPs were to compete meaningfully, they needed more than access, they needed agency.

We weren’t building a wholesale product in the traditional sense. We were building a platform. One that gave ISPs the ability to define their own services, manage their own policies, and operate at scale, without owning infrastructure or relying on manual processes.

That meant:

• Self-defined products instead of rigid bundles.
• Custom traffic policies and quotas, tailored per customer or per plan.
• Complete AAA control, Authentication, Authorisation, and Accounting, designed for wholesale, not retrofitted from retail systems.
• An API-first architecture for full automation, not tickets and turnaround times.

The centerpiece was RAMC (Remote Access Management Console), a provisioning and service definition system developed in-house. RAMC allowed ISPs to templatize their offerings, apply policies dynamically, and scale seamlessly. They could create a new product, say, a VoIP-optimized home service or a capped high-speed SME plan, and roll it out within hours.

Every aspect of service delivery was built to be automated, including integration with customer systems. We developed middleware that abstracted the shared infrastructure, offering each ISP a clean API layer to work against. They didn’t see complexity; they saw control. And more importantly, they could integrate on their own terms, using their own development teams, with no dependency on us for changes or customisation.

Traffic shaping and quality of service were managed through our Allot NetEnforcer deployment, using Virtual Channels to define how different traffic types were handled. ISPs could assign these profiles per user at login, creating differentiated products without hardware complexity. It wasn’t just “better shaping”, it was a product toolkit.

What this unlocked was powerful:

• Service creation times measured in hours, not weeks.
• Dynamic adjustment by time, user, or region.
• Usage-based or behaviour-based pricing, without new code or manual provisioning.

And all of this was invisible to the end customer. From their perspective, our clients looked like fully-fledged national providers, with their own product range, policies, and control panels, because in effect, they were.

It made our platform sticky. It made our customers competitive. And it made exit nearly impossible without breaking their business model.

 

 

Scale Without Friction – Provisioning That Matched Ambition

Autonomy without scale is a dead end. From the beginning, we knew that giving ISPs control wasn’t enough, we had to support them when their growth arrived. And for some, it arrived fast.

Our anchor customer, one of the country’s best-known independent ISPs, went from onboarding hundreds of new users a month to over 10,000 new active services provisioned per month through our platform. These weren’t just orders in a queue. These were full service activations, end users online, authenticated, and generating revenue.

And all of it was zero-touch.

That ISP had built their own frontend system, Mojo, a self-provisioning portal tightly integrated with our backend via API. From the moment a customer filled out the signup form and entered their card details, the entire process was automated:

• A DSL service order was generated and processed.
• Authentication credentials were issued.
• A service policy was assigned.
• The RAMC system activated the service in real time.
• The customer’s router was configured, either manually or via TR-069 if supported.
• An account was created in Mojo, with access to usage, billing, and support tools.

The whole journey, from signup to online, took minutes if the customer already had a DSL line. Even those who didn’t were provisioned with a temporary mobile service, delivered preconfigured and self-activating via remote management. It was a seamless interim solution while waiting for Telkom’s notoriously slow DSL installation process.

This was the holy grail for ISPs: order-to-revenue in minutes, not months.

Because of our platform’s design, all of this was possible without us having to manually touch a single record. ISPs that automated their customer onboarding processes could scale operations without bloated support teams. They could focus on customer experience and growth, knowing the infrastructure would scale with them.

RAMC wasn’t just fast. It was robust enough to support 30,000+ service activations a month across multiple ISPs, with no degradation in responsiveness. Every action, whether triggered by an ISP’s internal tool or a customer at home, was processed through the same efficient, fault-tolerant pipeline.

This made us more than a platform provider. We became a growth engine.

And the faster our customers grew, the stronger our platform moat became.

 

 

The Anchor Effect – Designing for a Strategic First Mover

Every market needs a spark. In our case, it was a first-mover ISP who saw the opportunity, understood the platform’s potential, and committed early. But they weren’t just any customer, they were the perfect one for what we were building.

They had:

• Ambition to scale fast.
• A legacy of service innovation (hosting, email, web tools).
• Strong brand trust among consumers.
• A well-built internal platform (Mojo) ready to integrate.
• A frustrated customer base eager for better broadband.

But more than anything, they were ready to prove something, to the market, to their peers, and even to themselves.

They weren’t seen as a “tier one” player at the time. In fact, there was still a perception that they were a boutique hosting company that happened to resell internet. By partnering with us, they got to show the industry, and their users, that they had outgrown that perception. And they were ready for prime time.

Behind the scenes, we enabled them to scale, but from the outside, it looked like they were doing it all themselves. That was deliberate.

They:

• Defined their own products.
• Automated onboarding, provisioning, and support.
• Handled account creation, billing, and service status visibility through Mojo.
• Offered bundled services and failover options (mobile as backup).
• Reached tens of thousands of customers in record time, without growing internal complexity.

It looked effortless. That was the point.

There were teething problems, every high-growth story has them. But the migration went far smoother than anyone expected. The customers stayed. The forums quieted down. The momentum held.

And as their numbers surged, they proved not only that our platform worked, but that it could reshape the broadband market in real time.

Their success wasn’t just a use case. It was a signal.

To customers: that there were real alternatives now. To competitors: that the rules had changed. To us: that the strategy was working.

 

 

 

Scaling Without Friction – The Power of Zero-Touch

It’s one thing to provision a new broadband service. It’s another to do it 10,000 times a month, without human bottlenecks, delays, or overhead. That’s what we built for.

Our systems weren’t just automated. They were composable, modular, and API-first. The ISP didn’t need to log tickets or batch requests. They didn’t even need to talk to us.

They ran their own product development processes, integrated directly into our platform.

The glue? A middleware layer we built specifically to abstract the complexity of shared infrastructure. It gave each ISP a clean, secure interface, so they could develop and deploy traffic policies, shape products, and monitor performance as if they were working with dedicated equipment.

Each ISP saw only their data, touched only their services, and worked within their own tooling, while we handled the orchestration behind the scenes.

This meant they could:

• Launch new product variations in hours, not weeks.
• Provision customers in real time, using their own systems.
• Manage traffic profiles dynamically, via API, per login session.
• Offer advanced routing and quota options without any specialist network knowledge.

One standout example was our first-mover ISP’s Mojo platform. Mojo served as the public-facing interface for customer signup, account management, billing, and service selection. But under the hood, it was tightly integrated with RAMC, our Remote Access Management Console.

Here’s how it worked:

1. A customer visited the ISP’s website, signed up, entered payment details, and chose a service plan.
2. Mojo triggered an API call to RAMC, provisioning the service in real time.
3. The user received credentials instantly.
4. They entered those into their router, and they were online.

No waiting. No ticketing. No delay between order and income.

Even customers waiting for a DSL line installation could get online almost immediately using a mobile backup device. That device arrived pre-configured, spoke to the TR-069 server upon activation, and delivered working service within two days. Once the DSL line was active, the user switched over seamlessly.

This was the essence of zero-touch.

We weren’t just scaling a product, we were scaling a revenue engine. Our platform was enabling the ISP to convert interest into income with almost no manual effort. And when your customer is provisioning 10,000+ services per month, that’s not just convenience. It’s survival.

And it was working.

 

Platform Stickiness – Value That’s Hard to Leave

The beauty of the platform wasn’t just in what it enabled ,  but in what it made difficult to replicate.

We weren’t trying to lock customers in through contractual fine print. Quite the opposite. Our strategy was to make leaving commercially irrational.

Customers stayed because the value was too high ,  not because they couldn’t get out, but because they couldn’t afford to lose what they had.

Everything we offered was designed around meaningful agency:

• Real product control
• On-demand provisioning
• Tiered performance and shaping
• Native integration into ISP systems and business logic

For an ISP to replicate what we offered, they’d need to:

• Acquire and operate traffic management infrastructure at scale
• Build or license a provisioning engine like RAMC
• Write secure middleware to separate and abstract multi-tenant control
• Develop internal tools for order management, quota handling, reporting, and billing alignment
• Secure national interconnects for DSL aggregation (including IPC)
• Build reliable authentication, authorisation, and accounting systems
• Test, validate, and operate it all at scale

And even then, they'd lose something harder to replace: the stability and performance of a system already proven to support 10,000+ new services per month ,  and doing so without human touchpoints.

If they left, they’d break their own operations, raise their costs, and undermine their speed to market. Worse, they’d be back to the very problem we had helped them solve: trying to compete using someone else’s infrastructure, rules, and limitations.

On the flip side, the platform gave them very real competitive advantages:

• Faster time to market for new services
• More agile response to pricing and traffic trends
• A direct path to revenue with minimal operational drag
• A stable foundation to scale into fibre and mobile offerings

It wasn’t just a product. It was their commercial edge.

That wasn’t accidental. It was the strategy all along.

 

 

Market Impact – Shifting the Balance of Power

When the platform launched, the immediate goal was to serve underserved ISPs ,  to give them autonomy, scalability, and access to infrastructure-grade capabilities without the overhead of building a network from scratch.

But the long-term effect was something far greater: it reshaped the South African broadband market.

The most visible impact came through our anchor customer. With tens of thousands of new services provisioned every month through their self-service system, they showed the market what scale looked like outside of the traditional telco framework.

Customers would visit their website, sign up in under five minutes, make payment, and receive a service that was automatically provisioned via Mojo ,  their in-house self-service engine ,  talking directly to RAMC via API. The service was live as soon as the user entered their credentials into a router. The first time many of those customers even saw a login screen, they were already online.

Behind the scenes, Mojo and RAMC worked in perfect tandem:

• Mojo handled signup, billing, service management, and the customer-facing account dashboard.
• RAMC executed provisioning, policy enforcement, and quota control, without requiring human intervention.
• The ISP looked like it was running a fully automated national network. Because in many ways ,  it was.

This level of automation and integration wasn’t just operational excellence ,  it was a marketing weapon. It allowed our customer to go from a mid-sized hosting provider to one of the largest broadband providers in the country, in under 18 months.

And it wasn’t just about them. Other ISPs saw what was possible. Customers started to expect better signup journeys, flexible service plans, and fast turnaround. Telkom’s monopoly began to weaken ,  not through direct competition, but through obsolescence.

Power shifted.

Where once all roads led through legacy infrastructure and opaque wholesale terms, there was now an open, scalable alternative that let ISPs build their own businesses ,  and their own futures ,  on their own terms.

And the industry followed. New models emerged. Fibre began to roll out with more open access philosophies. Mobile broadband started to be bundled into hybrid offerings. And the notion of what a national ISP could be was redefined.

Our wholesale platform didn’t just level the playing field.

It redrew the map.

 

From Product to Ecosystem – What We Really Built

We started with a clear objective: build a better wholesale broadband product. But the outcome far exceeded the brief.

We built a platform. Not just in the technical sense, but in the economic one ,  a foundation on and with which others could build.

It was a platform that allowed ISPs to:

• Move from idea to live product in a day.
• Scale without growing their teams.
• Differentiate without owning infrastructure.
• Control their destiny ,  from network behaviour to commercial terms.

And because our architecture was modular, extensible, and API-first, it supported more than just broadband. It supported business models. It enabled agility. It provided the scaffolding on which future products ,  fibre, mobile, hosting bundles ,  could be layered without redesigning the system or renegotiating contracts.

It created something new in the South African market: an ecosystem.

Our customers didn’t just use the product. They built with it. They used it to design their own bundles, create service tiers, and respond to shifting demand. They integrated it into their back-end systems and embedded it into their signup journeys. For many, it was their product.

That level of embedded value created not just loyalty, but stickiness. Leaving the platform wouldn’t just mean switching vendors ,  it would mean breaking their business.

And yet, that wasn’t a lock-in tactic. It was the natural by-product of genuine value creation.

We didn’t trap them. We empowered them ,  in a way that made them stronger, faster, and more competitive than their peers.

That is what creates market gravity.

We didn’t just disrupt a segment. We reshaped the structure of broadband service delivery ,  and gave rise to a new generation of providers who no longer needed to ask permission to succeed.

What started as a product became a market.

And that market became a movement.