FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jana Sedivy
InkBridge Networks
jana.sedivy@inkbridgenetworks.com
InkBridgeNetworks.com
Authentication platform for South Africa's largest retail fibre ISP recognised in the Best Network Technology & Software Development category
[OTTAWA, CANADA - October 5, 2026] - InkBridge Networks today announced it has been shortlisted for the 2026 Global Connectivity Awards in the Best Network Technology & Software Development category. The nomination recognises the company's design and deployment of a fault-tolerant RADIUS authentication platform for Herotel, South Africa's largest retail fibre ISP by connected homes.
The Global Connectivity Awards celebrate the people, projects, and partnerships shaping the future of digital infrastructure. InkBridge Networks was selected from among hundreds of entrants by an independent panel of judges drawn from across the global telecommunications and ICT industries.
"We're proud to be shortlisted alongside some of the best teams in the industry. The Herotel was built to help communities, including people in underserved townships who rely on affordable broadband for work and education."
— Jana Sedivy, VP Customer Experience and Product, InkBridge Networks
The challenge
Herotel grew through more than 30 acquisitions, each arriving with its own separate, on-premises RADIUS authentication infrastructure. The fragmented systems could not scale to match the ISP's aggressive growth targets, and they lacked the redundancy needed to survive South Africa's power grid instability, which saw 335 days of rolling blackouts in 2023.
Herotel also operates a pay-as-you-go broadband model targeting township and lower-income communities, where subscribers buy data by the week rather than by the month. This creates a far higher volume of account activations, deactivations, and re-authentications per subscriber than a conventional contract ISP - placing exceptional demands on authentication infrastructure.
The solution
InkBridge Networks consolidated Herotel's patchwork of legacy systems into a single, cloud-hosted RADIUS platform running in Google Cloud Platform, replicated on minimal on-premises hardware and linked through anycast routing. The platform introduces three innovations that InkBridge believes to be industry firsts for RADIUS deployments:
Hybrid anycast failover: When upstream connectivity fails, authentication traffic shifts automatically from cloud to local hardware via BGP route advertising - with no manual intervention and no subscriber impact. On restoration of connectivity, local and cloud data are seamlessly merged.
CoA-based simultaneous-use detection: A novel application of RADIUS change of authorisation (CoA) probes active sessions before rejecting duplicate logins - eliminating the destructive session cycling caused by conventional credential-sharing prevention approaches.
Asynchronous database I/O: A custom async MySQL module for FreeRADIUS decouples throughput from latency across geographically separated sites - work that has since been contributed back into the open-source FreeRADIUS project.
The entire platform runs on four servers, each with two CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM, a fraction of the hardware required by comparable commercial RADIUS solutions.
Results
Since deployment, Herotel's subscriber base has grown from 180,000 to more than 350,000 active customers, nearly doubling in under 18 months. The platform supports Herotel's expansion across 550+ towns, including communities where affordable broadband connectivity is central to people's economic participation. Herotel is now targeting 1.1 million homes, including 750,000 in township communities.
"The system's working as intended and it's made a big difference from where we were before. We had lots of individual systems that couldn't really scale. Now we've got one big cloud-based RADIUS solution that works very well for us,” said Imel Rautenbach, IT Executive at Herotel.
The full list of 2026 Global Connectivity Award finalists is available here.
About InkBridge Networks
InkBridge Networks engineers, supports, and installs foundational network solutions for authentication and network security. The core team at InkBridge Networks founded and continues to maintain the open-source FreeRADIUS Project, the world’s most popular RADIUS server, supporting hundreds of millions of users every day.
The company has an international team of network access architects and engineers with decades of experience providing complex, low-risk network solutions, including RADIUS, DHCPv4, DHCPv6, TACACS+, and DNS.
InkBridge Networks provides solutions engineering, support packages, consulting, and training optimised for mid-size to large enterprises, internet service providers, and universities. Learn more at InkBridgeNetworks.com.
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