Vodacom uses the term “Western Region” for an internal operating area that is larger than the Western Cape. Waldi Wepener, Managing Executive of Vodacom Western Cape, said it includes parts of the Northern Cape but excludes the Garden Route, which falls under the company’s Eastern Region. The R500 million investment announced by Vodacom this week is specifically for the Western Cape.
More than 50 sites in the province will be upgraded or replaced with newer radio equipment, software and network architecture, while another 50-plus sites will receive 4G capacity upgrades using 700MHz spectrum. Vodacom is also accelerating the rollout of new 5G sites in towns across the province. In a press release shared with media, it said the work will extend into townships and deep-rural communities, including Khayelitsha, Delft, Gugulethu, Langa, Mitchells Plain and Philippi.
Wepener said the company is investing in new sites both where coverage is still inadequate and where population growth has put pressure on existing infrastructure. In parts of Cape Town, he said, the problem is no longer simply whether there is coverage, but whether there is enough capacity for the number of people using the network.
Vodacom says data use in the Western Cape increased by more than 40% over the past year. Wepener said smartphone penetration in the province is now above 80%, compared with roughly two-thirds to 70% nationally.
The company is also spending on batteries and generators to keep sites operating during power interruptions. Wepener said the Western Cape does not have the same level of electricity instability as some other provinces, but local outages still affect the network. During the storms earlier this year, he said, about 20% of Vodacom’s sites in the affected area were out of service at the peak, largely because of power availability. Vodacom says the additional resilience work will address localised load reduction, cable theft, municipal infrastructure failures and maintenance activities.
The network investment comes as Vodacom tries to change how customers buy its services. Wepener said there had been a perception that Vodacom was more expensive than MTN and Telkom, and that the company had been working to address that through prepaid pricing and new products. Just4You and Just4YourTown offer personalised prepaid bundles based on usage and location, while Easy2Own allows prepaid customers to finance smartphones with airtime and data included in the repayment structure.
Vodacom also raised its postpaid prices in 2026, which it described as its annual pricing adjustment. The average increase was 4.7%, against 5.4% at MTN, both measured on the customer’s total bill. MTN’s figure rested on a 9.7% average rise in subscription fees. Telkom raised many postpaid plans by 8% from 1 April, with an average of 6.5% across its mobile plans. Cell C’s adjustment came earlier, on 1 December 2025, and averaged 8% on postpaid subscriptions, with individual plans between 7% and 10%. The figures are not like for like. Some are averages on the total bill and others on subscription fees only, and the operators raised prices at different times.
Vodacom is also preparing month-to-month postpaid products that customers can cancel without a long-term commitment. Wepener gave examples of 20GB for R129 a month, 80GB for R179 and 400GB for R399, with the data split between anytime and night-time use. He described these as forthcoming offers rather than existing standard tariffs.
MTN already sells month-to-month data through Pi, a digital-only brand that runs on its network. Pi’s launch pricing was 20GB for R199, 40GB for R299 and 80GB for R399. Telkom offers month-to-month plans through its FlexOn range. The products are structured differently, so headline data prices are not directly comparable.
Vodacom is also trying to sell more services to the same customers. Alongside mobile, it offers prepaid home internet and prepaid fibre, as well as conventional postpaid fibre. Its enterprise business provides connectivity, cloud, security, unified communications and internet of things services.
In government, one of its projects is the deployment of 10,000 smart meters in Mossel Bay under the National Treasury’s RT29 framework. Wepener said the system allows the municipality to track electricity consumption and identify possible tampering and other problems that might otherwise require manual inspections. He would not provide figures on the project’s financial impact, citing confidentiality agreements, but said Vodacom was checking what information could be released.
Smart metering is generally sold on the promise of improved revenue collection, lower operating costs and reduced losses. Without municipality-specific figures, those results cannot yet be assessed independently in the Mossel Bay case.
Vodacom’s latest announcement also presents the network investment as a digital-inclusion measure, pointing to access to education, healthcare, financial services and other digital services. Network coverage alone, however, does not tell us whether people can afford a suitable device, data or a home connection.
The Western Cape has some of the country’s strongest connectivity indicators, but household income and access vary sharply between communities. We looked at the gap between network coverage and practical, affordable access in our earlier piece on digital inclusion.
Vodacom is therefore putting more capacity into a market where most people are already connected, while trying to sell them more data, newer devices, home internet and business services at a time when all of the major mobile operators are adjusting prices and changing their products.