“It’s not as if we were gambling everything,” says Gian Visser. The CEO of Afrihost is affable and charming, which compounds the mystery of why one rarely hears more of him. His customers certainly do – Visser still writes the emails that announce new deals and specials. But in wider circles, he and his company aren’t household names.

Yet Afrihost is easily one of the country’s biggest providers of ADSL. It can also take much credit for how the local broadband market has changed, pulling it out of the dark days of paying a small ransom for a gigabyte of data.