Frogfoot Networks welcomes industry veteran Shane Chorley as new CEO

Frogfoot Networks' new CEO Shane Corley | image supplied

Van der Merwe will be moving on to take up the position of chief strategy officer at Vivica Group, of which Frogfoot is a wholly-owned subsidiary, where he is responsible for the group’s corporate development, strategy formulation and execution across the group.

Chorley, a well-respected industry veteran, is no stranger to Frogfoot. He was instrumental in acquiring Frogfoot in 2015. He joined the company in 2016 to lead its sales and marketing where he helped build Frogfoot into one of the largest fibre operators in South Africa providing services to more than 190 wholesale providers, 13,000 businesses and 135,000 residential customers.

Before joining Frogfoot, he served in various leadership roles in Vox Telecommunications, another Vivica group subsidiary, since 1999.

Commenting on the new CEO appointment, Van der Merwe says:

“It is a very emotional decision for me to relinquish control of this very special company I have built over more than two decades, but I cannot think of a more deserving person to lead Frogfoot than Shane Chorley. He has been by my side since the beginning of our journey to become a leading open-access fibre operator in South Africa. His fingerprints are all over Frogfoot and he has gradually taken over more and more of my responsibilities over the past few years as my focus shifted to supporting other group companies and expanding the group into other markets.”

According to Chorley, this is all part of the plan to grow the Vivica Group and believes that Abraham is more of an asset in the group. He notes that Van Der Merwe remains a critical member of the team and while he is now more focused on the broader group, he will still play a very active role at Frogfoot.

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“Our customers are the lifeblood of our business and continually improving our customer experience is a key focus for me. Over the last 12 months we have made significant investments into network upgrades and service experience tools to improve uptime and overall customer experience,” Chorley says.

These improvements include deploying a dark national long distance (NLD) network and investing significantly into improving the uptime availability of nodes on its own networks, as well as those of partners, during higher stages of load shedding.

“Key plans going forward include constantly growing our fibre footprint to deliver more value to our customers, expanding our network into townships to try and get fibre to all and extending our product offering to add fibre to the tower (FTTT). It is critical we build a business that is known for its customer service, uptime and ability to deliver value to our customers,” says Chorley.