Internet provider Herotel is connecting the camps of the Nedbank Gravel Burn mountain bike race with speeds of up to 500Mbps.
The seven-day race covers 750km across the Great Karoo, from Graaff-Reinet to Shamwari. Much of the route passes through areas without reliable Internet access.
“Each overnight camp becomes a temporary village, bringing riders, race officials, medical teams, media and support staff together at remote locations,” Herotel said.
A company spokesperson told MyBroadband the service will support up to 500Mbps across four locations. These sites are in some of the most rural parts of the Karoo.
This is the second edition of the race. Herotel also supplied Internet to the event last year. At that time, technology partners NTT DATA and Fortinet built and ran the internal event network.
This year Herotel is the headline sponsor. The company is now setting up the equipment itself and building and running the network across the Burn Camps.
Herotel said people at each camp need the Internet for different jobs. These include recording results, coordinating medical support, filing race reports and staying in touch with family at home.
The company said it will put safety, medical coordination and race timing first. Riders and staff will also get access across the camps.
Herotel chief commercial officer Estiaan Ferreira said the company spent years building networks in places where connections are hard to deliver.
“The Nedbank Gravel Burn takes us into exactly those kinds of environments, except now you suddenly have an event arriving with hundreds of people who need the network to work from day one,” Ferreira said.
Ferreira said the team had to know who relied on the network. He said it was designed so the most important services never drop.
Herotel said it may leave some of the equipment behind after the race. It could then keep serving farms, landowners, local businesses and nearby communities.
Herotel has about 400,000 active customers on its fibre and fixed wireless networks. It serves more than 550 towns, cities and suburbs. A large part of its network lies outside the major metros.
The company was also the Internet provider at the 2026 Absa Cape Epic. In that race, 1,450 riders covered about 700km of remote and rugged land over eight days.
“The race village, roughly the size of 30 rugby fields, is packed up and rebuilt in a new town, sometimes with little existing infrastructure to build on,” Herotel said of that event.
Herotel plans to launch its Evry satellite Internet service, powered by Amazon, in 2027. The company said it is built to reach homes and small businesses beyond the reach of fibre and fixed wireless.
Source: this article is based on reporting by MyBroadband. Image: MyBroadband. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.