Fibre Internet

Long before fibre reached Penhill, the estate depended on a fragile copper network. In 2012, Penhill had only around 600 copper lines in total, fed by two incoming cables from the exchange near the train station. The route ran along the R102, cut sharply through a field, passed under the train tracks, and emerged at the entrance and bottom end of Penhill.

That route made the copper an easy, repeated target for cable thieves. For years, Telkom, private security, and the Penhill community fought a running battle to keep the lines intact, working closely with Telkom’s anti-theft unit and escalating countermeasures step by step: first encasing the copper in concrete, then welding the access manholes shut — which only bought a little time, as thieves adapted by digging in from the side, pulling the cable out, and towing it away by vehicle. Eventually, voltage-sensing alarms were installed on the cables, triggering the instant a line was cut. They didn’t prevent outages — some lasted weeks — but they cut response times dramatically and reduced the damage.

Over time, that alarm system built something more valuable than the copper itself: an organised, fast-responding community.

One warm winter evening, at around 7pm, the alarms went off and roughly 25 residents responded immediately. They nearly caught a man found with an axe and tools; he fled and escaped in the confusion, leaving his tools behind. Police attended briefly but weren’t meaningfully involved.

A few weeks later, the alarms triggered again — this time, five children between 15 and 19 had been coerced into digging up and cutting the cables. Around 70 community members turned out. As the group scattered, residents tracked and apprehended three of them. Police arrested the three, and charges were laid jointly with Telkom’s anti-theft unit.

Dieter’s argument to Telkom’s regional and national anti-theft management was simple: fibre has no scrap value, so replacing the copper with fibre would end the theft problem outright. Budget was the obstacle, and for years providers weren’t interested — the standard reply was that the route into Penhill was too difficult, the properties too few, and the distances between them too great to be financially viable.

Vumatel was approached and quoted roughly R600,000 to R1 million to bring fibre in, driven largely by the cost of a wayleave to cross under the train tracks. Telkom/OpenServe, which already had infrastructure under the tracks, was the more realistic route — so Dieter pursued them directly, building a business case OpenServe couldn’t easily dismiss: a list of 150 interested households, with names, contact numbers, and desired speeds, gathered door to door.

That pressure became more urgent as Telkom began threatening to stop replacing stolen copper altogether. In June 2022, PHORA ran a further formal survey, again encouraging residents to register their interest in fibre with their respective ISPs.

Openserve came to the party in September 2022, accessing Penhill via the one old copper route and distributing to residences using the overhead telephone poles. Overhead lines weren’t without controversy among residents, but the choice meant Penhill got fibre roughly three years sooner than the alternative underground route would have allowed — and it brought an end to decades of maintaining vulnerable copper infrastructure, finally delivering the modern connectivity that a long-promised (and never delivered) shared-provider cell tower in the quarry grounds never could.

In April 2024, Octotel brought a second fibre network into Penhill, installed underground using manual labour to dig trenches — causing some damage and disruption along the way, and running one access route per two properties rather than per property, to save on costs. That gave Penhill homeowners a choice between two independent fibre networks.