AT the start of 2025, wireless technologies accounted for 41,84% of Zimbabwe’s fixed broadband subscriptions. By the end of it, that figure was 54,54%. The crossover, the point at which wireless became the majority technology in the fixed broadband market, happened during the third quarter. The Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) published the numbers. Nobody assembled them into what they represent: Zimbabwe’s fixed broadband market has structurally become a wireless market within a single calendar year. The shift is not a trend. It is a reclassification of what fixed broadband means in this country.
Fixed wireless access, as Potraz defines it, is primarily fixed LTE: home internet services delivered over cellular infrastructure, without a physical cable connecting the premises. It is distinct from satellite internet, which Potraz classifies separately as VSAT and which includes Starlink subscriptions. The FWA crossover is therefore an LTE story. Fixed LTE subscriptions grew from 109 504 in Q1 to 143 323 by Q4, a 30,9% increase in a single year, as operators extended home broadband services over their 4G networks into areas and income segments that fixed-line infrastructure had not reached. Potraz attributes the trend directly to “accelerated fixed LTE deployment and consumers preferring flexible hardware-light internet solutions.”
On the other side of the ledger, DSL has been declining without interruption. TelOne, which operates Zimbabwe’s copper infrastructure and is the primary DSL provider, saw DSL subscriptions fall from 94 346 in Q1 to 87 713 by Q4, a 7% decline across the year. This continues a pattern BuddeComm identified as structural: DSL connections grew until 2021, when copper-based subscriptions began contracting as growth shifted to fibre and wireless alternatives. DSL’s problem is not pricing alone. TelOne’s ADSL2+ infrastructure tops out at around 4 Mbps in areas where copper is still functional, in a market where fixed LTE and fibre are offering multiples of that speed at comparable or lower cost. The copper network also suffers persistent vandalism and theft. TelOne has publicly acknowledged losses exceeding US$50 million from cable theft alone, degrading the reliability of the very infrastructure DSL depends on.
Fibre is not the story of wired decline. Active fibre subscriptions grew from 81 287 in Q1 to 86 225 by Q4, a 6,1% increase across the year, with a particularly strong Q4 showing 7,42% growth. Fibre is a growth category. The problem is pace. Fixed LTE subscriptions grew five times faster over the same period. In a market where consumers increasingly choose flexibility and hardware simplicity over the reliability premium that fibre justifies, the technology winning the fixed broadband expansion race is not the one running cables to premises. It is the one turning existing mobile towers into home internet providers.
Running alongside the FWA crossover, but through a separate channel, is Starlink. Zimbabwe’s VSAT subscriptions, the category under which Starlink is counted, grew from 30 907 in Q1 to 67 057 by Q4, more than doubling in twelve months. Starlink is not classified as FWA in Potraz’s methodology, but its commercial impact on the fixed broadband market is substantial and running on a different axis. Where the FWA story is one of access expansion into underserved segments, the Starlink story is one of pricing disruption in the incumbent ISP market. By Q2 2025, Starlink’s 40 146 subscribers had already consumed 83,9 petabytes of fixed internet traffic, 22,5% of the national total, second only to Liquid Intelligent Technologies. Liquid and TelOne responded with price cuts and new unlimited packages in August 2025, forcing a repricing of the fixed broadband market that no domestic regulator had managed to achieve.
The Starlink effect is most visible in traffic share rather than subscription count. Liquid Intelligent Technologies, which dominated fixed internet/data traffic at 58,90% in Q3 2025, fell to 48,41% in Q4 as Starlink’s traffic grew 42,76% in a single quarter, rising from 117,83 petabytes to 168,21 petabytes. Equity Axis observed that Starlink added approximately 50,4 petabytes of traffic in Q4 alone, more than the sector’s total net traffic growth of around 39 petabytes, confirming that satellite broadband is expanding Zimbabwe’s served market into locations that fixed broadband economics had never justified reaching: farms, mines, safari lodges, peri-urban residential areas, and secondary city businesses. This is a market extension, not a substitution. Fixed LTE, fibre, and VSAT subscriptions all grew simultaneously in Q4, which means three distinct technologies are each finding their own market rather than cannibalising one another.
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Together, these two forces, FWA growth and Starlink penetration, are reclassifying what a fixed broadband provider is. For most of the market’s history, fixed broadband meant infrastructure: copper lines, fibre cables, licensed spectrum used for point-to-point wireless. The operators who owned that infrastructure set the terms of the market. What 2025 established is that a consumer can now receive home internet service from a mobile tower she never sees and a satellite she cannot locate in the sky, without a physical cable, without a telecoms contractor, and without depending on the copper network that TelOne has struggled to maintain. The definitional boundary between fixed and mobile broadband, already blurred by home LTE routers, has effectively dissolved for the subscriber. What remains is the regulatory boundary, and that boundary is what Potraz is still working out how to draw.
In Q1 2025, Zimbabwe had a wired fixed broadband majority. By Q3, it did not. The wire did not break. It was bypassed.
Muhamba is a business analyst, market analyst and the AMH Group Chair’s executive assistant. valentinem@alphamedia.co.zw