Headquartered in Stellenbosch and operating under licenses granted by ICASA, VO Connect delivers licensed last-mile microwave connectivity across South Africa’s metros and increasingly in rural towns. What makes VO different is that it doesn’t chase the end user; it supplies the telecom and internet giants who do, providing them with the reliable, high-speed backbone that underpins secondary connections, failovers, and increasingly, primary links where fibre infrastructure is unavailable or unviable.
At the heart of this story is Kevin Taskes, co-founder and CEO, who has been quietly pioneering fixed wireless networks for over two decades, long before “wireless” became sexy again.
VO Connect’s roots go back to the early 2000s, when Taskes and his partners – veterans of the ISP and telecom sectors – were helping early adopters like Smart Village connect residential estates to the internet. The challenge wasn’t getting data from the modem to the estate, it was what happened at the backhaul. Telkom’s legacy infrastructure could offer only 2 Mbps from the estate to the data centre, regardless of how many residents were trying to connect. It was a bottleneck that threatened to strangle demand before it began.
That’s when Taskes and his team made their first visionary move: they decided to go wireless.
“I remember Wayne Mackenzie and I climbing a hill, negotiating with a tower owner, importing some Radwin kit, and setting up our first wireless link,” recalls Taskes. “It was in Jackal Creek. We went from 2 Mbps to 9 Mbps overnight. Our customer was thrilled.”
That was 2008. Since then, VO Connect has scaled into a national network, operating with licensed spectrum in the 10.5 GHz and 28 GHz bands, and delivering up to 200 Mbps per customer from a single base station. Compared to fibre, this dramatically reduces the cost of deployment and expands their footprint faster, especially in hard-to-reach or underserved areas.
From the beginning, VO Connect was bootstrapped. The founders funded the company with their own working capital, drawing on their home bonds, and used refurbished equipment where they could. For years, growth was cautious, organic, and deeply hands-on.
But as VO matured and its reputation as a resilient, go-to connectivity partner grew, the team reached a crossroads: scale further or risk stagnation. With a new generation of leadership emerging (Taskes’ own son now works in sales, and second-generation Justin Mackenzie has taken over the MD role ), the time was right to evolve.
“We knew we needed a partner that understood not just the capital requirements of scaling, but also the business culture,” says Taskes.
That partner came in the form of Vuna Partners, a private equity firm with a sharp eye for businesses building real, long-term infrastructure value. The relationship didn’t materialise overnight. In fact, Taskes first met Vuna’s Siya Nhlumayo back in 2018 through mutual dealings in the wireless ISP space. The connection stuck.
“There was trust from day one,” says Taskes. “He wasn’t just about the deal. It was about people and culture. We stayed in touch for years, and when the time came, he was the first person I called.”
The investment took almost two years to negotiate but was finalised in December 2023, with Vuna taking a 49% stake and two board seats. The remaining 51% remains in the hands of the three founders, preserving the entrepreneurial DNA of the business.
Since Vuna’s investment, VO Connect has begun its next chapter, consolidating and expanding its footprint without losing its soul. In March 2023, VO was appointed the preferred fixed wireless provider to one of the country’s top telcos, migrating customers off their legacy wireless network and onto VO’s more modern infrastructure.
It’s a massive scale-up, but for Taskes, it hasn’t come at the cost of service quality.
“Our secret weapon is our people. Our culture,” he says. “We’ve got engineers in bakkies climbing mountains, rebuilding burnt-out towers, working through the night to meet SLAs. The network never sleeps. And neither do we.”
This level of commitment has made VO indispensable for Telco’s and enterprises looking for redundancy. While fibre is the default for primary connections, fixed wireless remains the preferred backup, especially in areas prone to cable theft, construction delays, or regulatory red tape.
“We’re now seeing demand for gigabit failovers in places like Centurion,” Taskes notes. “We’ve built networks with speeds up to 10 Gbps on 80 GHz. That’s real performance.”
Looking forward, Taskes is especially excited about what he calls “Wireless 2.0”, a new phase of hybrid infrastructure that blends long- and short-range spectrum with deep fibre interconnects.
A recent partnership with Liquid Intelligent Technologies exemplifies this strategy. VO migrated Liquid’s wireless customers onto its own network while leveraging Liquid’s vast fibre backbone to bolster its reach. It’s a symbiotic relationship that allows VO to deploy faster, smarter, and more cost-effectively.
“We’ve got coverage in all the major metros as well as outlyers like Upington, George, Richards Bay and Mthatha, even the Kruger National Park,” says Taskes. “The point is to be everywhere that fibre isn’t. To be the fallback, the first responder, the enabler.”
But it’s not just about business. It’s also about bridging South Africa’s persistent digital divide. VO Connect sees itself as an enabler of rural connectivity, not through grand government schemes, but by empowering local entrepreneurs.
“Government needs to work with the people on the ground, train, support, and license them. They’re the ones who’ll build the last mile.”
What makes VO Connect unusual isn’t just the technology or the business model. It’s the stubborn, authentic sense of purpose that radiates through the organisation.
“I’ve always said: if you’re going to succeed in this industry, you need passion,” says Taskes. “The kind that gets you through long nights, hard months, and financial near misses. We’ve built this business meter by meter, quietly, persistently. And we’re just getting started.”
With its mix of grit, innovation, and a people-first ethos, VO Connect proves that you don’t need to chase headlines to build something enduring. You just need the right spectrum and the right partners.
A recording of this podcast was originally aired 23 September 2025, on Classic Business with Michael Avery.