Fibertime has acquired FlightPlan Precision Drones, bringing aerial mapping in-house after spending millions of rands on outsourced surveys. Founder Alan Knott-Craig announced it on LinkedIn, saying the company needs accurate ground data to plan its networks and that municipal and census data on townships is not accurate.

FlightPlan co-founders Wian Meier and Zandi Jacobs join the group and Fibertime's pipeline now stands close to one million homes.

Fibertime sells 100Mbps uncapped fibre at R5 a day, prepaid, with a free Nokia router and battery backup, and it connects every home in an area rather than waiting for sign-ups. That means it has to plot each home before it can build, and it submits its own 3D aerial imagery as engineering drawings to municipalities to obtain wayleaves. The scale explains the purchase.

When we ran our founder story earlier this year, Fibertime had roughly 380,000 connected homes across 49 townships in 13 cities and seven provinces, connecting about 1,200 households a day and growing 20% to 40% month on month. It has since passed 500,000 connections. Targets are two million homes by 2028, needing around R10-billion in investment, and five million by 2030 at about R25-billion.

FlightPlan specialises in LiDAR capture, area mapping and AI models trained on the data it collects. Meier is also a co-founder and director of Gameplan Fibre, which designs networks in formal and informal areas.

Knott-Craig was characteristically blunt about the reasoning, writing that after spending millions on drone surveys, they decided to just buy a drone company, because it is cheaper than renting and, most importantly, faster, with no waiting in the queue. MyBroadband traced the company's history from its Isizwe origins, including the early Kayamandi network shrinking to 891 homes in May 2023 when Wi-Fi for the final drop failed against corrugated iron walls. Nokia announced an additional 400,000-home rollout with Fibertime in October 2025.

Fibertime connects 1,200 homes a day and cannot have its build rate set by a surveyor's availability, so it bought the bottleneck. That is the same logic behind owning its own installation crews and shipping its own routers, and it is worth noting for anyone scaling physical infrastructure: the constraint is rarely capital; it is whichever supplier you have to wait for.

The more interesting asset is the data. Our April story already noted Fibertime had household mapping and aerial imaging across more than 265,000 homes, and that its insights team was using it to challenge official population figures. It now owns the capability that produces that dataset.

In a market where Knott-Craig has told us the industry hides behind homes passed, knowing precisely what is on the ground is a genuine advantage.

You might also like our piece on the Comsol 5G network chasing the same underserved homes without trenching, why Capitec home broadband needs somebody else's network, and the SA 5G coverage gap all of this competes to close.

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