The Hard Part of Fibre Isn’t the Fibre
How Net Nine Nine Built a Mobile-First Customer Experience for Prepaid Fibre.
South Africa’s connectivity market spans vastly different economic realities. While traditional fibre products assume stable monthly income and contract billing, many households rely on irregular earnings and cannot commit to fixed monthly subscriptions. As a result, millions remain dependent on expensive and unreliable mobile connectivity.
Building a fibre business that can sustainably serve this market requires a fundamentally different model.
Five years ago, Net Nine Nine set out to do exactly that: build a fibre business designed specifically for South Africa’s underserved market.
Unlike most fibre operators, Net Nine Nine runs a closed-access model, acting as both the fibre network operator (FNO) and the internet service provider (ISP).
This means the company must not only build and maintain fibre infrastructure in challenging environments but also deliver the entire customer experience end-to-end.
The model they built was deliberately different. No long-term commitments or contracts. No installation fees. Customers simply sign up, top up when they need connectivity, and enjoy fast, affordable fibre for as long as it works for them.
For communities where traditional fibre packages were often out of reach, the response was immediate. In their first pilot area, Net Nine Nine reached remarkable household penetration within the first year which created the foundation to drive investment nationwide.
But success quickly revealed a different challenge.
The hard part of fibre, it turned out, wasn’t the fibre.
It was developing an exceptional customer experience.
Industry
Telecommunications / Internet Service Provider (ISP) / Fibre Network Operator (FNO)
Headquarters
South Africa
Website
https://netninenine.co.za/
Systems for a Different Kind of Growth
Net Nine Nine’s model relies on a very different customer experience from what most fibre providers are built to support.
Traditional ISPs typically assume customers will sign up online, pay via debit order or credit card, and commit to a monthly contract. Net Nine Nine’s customers demand flexibility and simplicity: The ability to top-up their connectivity with the package they can afford, as and when they need it.
That difference changes everything operationally.
Payments must be flexible. Billing rules need to accommodate prepaid behaviour rather than predictable monthly subscriptions. And sign-ups often happen face-to-face with the assistance of a local agent rather than through a website.
The majority of Net Nine Nine’s sales are assisted by trained agents, who help customers sign up. Many of these agents are members of the local community, creating a level of trust that traditional online sales channels often struggle to achieve.
“Customers are signing up with someone from their community who guides them through the process. That personal touch is uniquely Net Nine Nine.”
— Jessie Napier, Net Nine Nine
This model works incredibly well but demands the use of robust and reliable systems.
As Net Nine Nine’s growth accelerated and their business model evolved. They needed a platform that would support this level of growth and agility.
The team recognized they needed a platform purpose-built for prepaid, high-volume, agent-assisted sales at scale.
Rethinking the Customer Experience
To solve the problem, Net Nine Nine partnered with SOLIDitech, whose SOLID platform is designed to support complex ISP operations at scale.
Together, the two teams focused on the most critical parts of Net Nine Nine’s model: the customer experience through the app’s sign up journey and the payment options they had available. At the centre of the new experience is a mobile-first application used by both agents and customers, enabling sign-ups, activations and payments directly from a smartphone.
The goal was to create a simple, efficient and smooth onboarding experience.
Signing up a customer needed to be fast, clear and guided step-by-step. Agents in stores or in the field had to be able to help customers activate services quickly and confidently.
Supporting various payment options was essential as not all Net Nine Nine customers have credit cards or use traditional banking tools.
The result was a prepaid top-up model built specifically for Net Nine Nine’s business.
“The top-up model is really simple and familiar to customers,” Napier says. “It’s logical, easy to use, and doesn’t involve complicated contracts or processes.”
Expanding payment flexibility was a key priority, as many customers in this market do not have access to credit cards. Broadening the available payment options was therefore essential. The new system provided flexibility with expanded payment methods, empowering customers to choose the most suitable product. The top-up model also enables customers to change products themselves without staff intervention, creating a scalable solution.
The result is a sign-up process that is easy to explain, easy to use, and easy for customers to trust – three things that matter enormously when building services in communities where trust is everything.
Transitioning 70,000 Customers to a New Platform
Rebuilding the customer experience was only part of the challenge. The real test came when the Net Nine Nine customer base needed to be moved onto the newly deployed SOLID platform.
Development began in January 2025. By July, the new platform was ready. In a big bang approach, approximately 70,000 active customers were successfully migrated. All this, while maintaining smooth operations and uninterrupted service for their customers.
In telecom environments, migrations of this scale can be complex, high-risk projects that can take many months or even years to complete.
“We started in mid-January and by 3 July 2025 all our customers were successfully migrated to the brand-new system” Napier says. “That’s just over five months – which is honestly unheard of for a migration at this scale.”
Crucially, the migration took place while the business continued to grow. New customers were still signing up, installations were still being completed, and the company continued operating without major disruption to customers.
Strong app adoption and increased process automation reduced the operational burden on staff, giving the team the capacity to support a 20% increase in installation volumes within the first eight months – growth that the platform was built to accommodate.”
Engineering at the Pace of the Business
Delivering this kind of change requires more than new software. It requires close collaboration between the Net Nine Nine and SOLIDitech engineering teams.
Napier says much of the project’s success comes down to how the two teams work together day to day.
“From the beginning, the relationship between our teams worked really well,” she says. “We sync daily, foster open communication channels, and both teams remain actively engaged in solving problems.”
That working rhythm makes it possible to stay agile when new ideas emerge.
“If our executives come up with something they want to try, we discuss it with the SOLIDitech team and very quickly find a way to implement it,” Napier explains. “Sometimes they already have a module that solves the problem out of the box, and other times they can build something new.”
Napier also emphasises that the success of the project depends on having an invested team on both sides.
“You need an invested team on both sides,” she says. “We have developers who understand our business and domain, while SOLIDitech have engineers who understand their platform. That combination makes a big difference.”
Supporting Growth at National Scale
That ability to iterate quickly has been critical as Net Nine Nine continues expanding its footprint across the country.
With the SOLID platform now in place, the business has the operational foundation required to scale its model across a growing national footprint.
Today, Net Nine Nine supports a rapidly expanding network that includes:
- Thousands of new installations every month
- 25+ Retail locations nationwide
- Hundreds of community-based sales agents
Each of these touchpoints feeds into the same operational system – managing sign-ups, payments, installations and customer interactions through the SOLID platform.
The mobile-first system that anchors the sign-up process also helps coordinate this distributed workforce.
“The app solved two major problems for us,” Napier explains. “It makes the customer journey fast and easy, but it also gives our teams the tools they need to manage the process across all our stores and agents.”
Just as importantly, the platform continues adapting alongside the business.
A Different Model for Fibre Growth
Net Nine Nine’s story highlights a lesson many fibre operators are beginning to recognise.
Deploying infrastructure is only part of the challenge. In prepaid markets, the real difficulty lies in designing a customer model that works – and building the systems capable of supporting it at scale.
Through its collaboration with SOLIDitech and the SOLID platform, Net Nine Nine now has the operational foundation, systems flexibility and agility to scale prepaid fibre nationally.
In markets as dynamic as South Africa’s, building the network is only the beginning.
Engineering the systems that make the model work is where the real advantage lies.