South Africa is reportedly looking into divesting its stake in state-owned enterprise (SOE) Broadband Infraco, with Rabelani Dagada, a spokesperson for the Johannesburg Broadband Network Project (JBNP), cited as saying: ‘There is [speculation] in the ICT sector that even the national government is considering selling their own broadband company… due to intense competition’, BusinessTech reports. The government is estimated to require as much as ZAR100 billion (USD8.5 billion) to meet its ambitious broadband targets, with Broadband Infraco, which manages infrastructure rollouts to underserved areas on behalf of the government, yet to report a profit.
TeleGeography notes that Broadband Infraco, which is owned by the Department of Public Enterprises (74%) and Industrial Development Corporation (26%), was managing 14,000km of fibre-optic cable routes connecting Gauteng (including Johannesburg and Pretoria) to the major metropolitan centres of Bloemfontein, Kimberley, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban, Nelspruit and Polokwane with 158 Points of Presence (PoPs) countrywide.