In 2023,  ICT market research company Analytico performed a survey of customer satisfaction on South Africa’s ISPs. Atomic Access came out at the top, as the only company surveyed with 100% customer satisfaction.

Keeping a satisfaction score as high as Atomic has for the past 7 years is no mean feat, especially when you consider the industry they are in and how vocal unhappy internet users can be. The real-world average rating for the company across the main review platforms, from Facebook to Hello Peter, is 4.88/5, or roughly 98% - well above any of their competitors.

There is actually a fairly simple reason for this. The company offers a leaner product to a narrower customer base.

As co-founder Joe Botha explains, the team began in 2018 when they realised that the ISP space was still bogged down providing services on outdated protocols designed for dial-up days and almost nobody was offering IPv6 services. They realised they could make headway in the space by focusing only on the future of internet connectivity, fibre, and stripping out frills like web hosting.

The company launched in August 2018, gaining visibility through MyBroadband, with its initial Octotel and Frogfoot customers going live. They are now serving customers on all four major Open Access fibre networks in the Cape: Octotel, Vumatel, Frogfoot and Openserve.

Their initial client base was recruited almost entirely via word-of-mouth, a method which tends to select for people who occupy a common social network. In this case, mainly IT professionals and technical friends. They even have a quiz on their website which tests potential customers on their knowledge of fibre and wi-fi, and offer a discount for displaying technical knowledge. The Telegram quiz is here if you want to give it a try: www.atomicaccess.co.za/quiz

Instead of trying to grow as rapidly as possible, they chose to focus on the customers who are easiest to serve; knowing how to do basic troubleshooting as an internet user makes everyone’s lives easier. Atomic also only offers services to the main population-heavy regions of the Cape at present, these regions take in 77% of the population together, and include the main tech hubs like Stellenbosch and Cape Town.

In order to make their selective appeal even more explicit, they advertise an emphasis on Open Networking, particularly Linux. Atomic’s network team compile custom Linux kernels for their NVIDIA routers, utilizing a fully Debian-based system with open-source routing software. These choices enable customers to benefit from ASIC-level performance and a scalable network capable of handling high traffic volumes with consistently low latency.

Larger ISPs are often bogged down by a customer base which includes many older, or simply less tech-savvy customers. These customers (the bulk of the clientele usually) tend to opt for the cheapest packages, low quality Wi-Fi routers, and can cost a great deal more time in customer support.

Atomic Access is also still run by its founders, which tends to keep a company efficient and flexible. The transition to the managerial stage of corporate development makes companies slow-moving, risk-averse, and inefficient, which has been the case with much of the local telecoms sector.

As the founders like to say, Atomic is the fibre ISP for people who have been burnt by big ISP support. If you live in the Western Cape and you are looking for an alternative to the big corporate ISPs, have a look at their website: www.atomicaccess.co.za

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