The 2024 Ranking of South Africa’s Mobile Networks!

South Africa’s Mobile Networks: Who’s the Best and Who’s the Worst?

Ever wondered if you’re on the best mobile network in South Africa? Well, thanks to a recent survey, we now have a pretty clear picture of who's leading the pack and who's struggling to keep up. Back in 2018, MyBroadband ran a major survey looking at download speeds, upload speeds, and latency across the country’s five major networks. Let’s just say, the results were... revealing!

What Did They Measure?

Over a period of three months, MyBroadband analyzed almost 400,000 speed tests to see how South Africa’s networks stack up. They looked at:

• Download speeds: How fast you can pull data from the internet.
• Upload speeds: How fast you can send data (think uploading photos or videos).
• Latency: The time it takes for your phone to connect to a server before it starts transferring data./li>

At the time of the survey, South Africa's average mobile download speed was 22.18 Mbps. But some networks were much faster than that, and some... well, not so much.

The Speed Champions

Good news for MTN users—MTN took the top spot with an average download speed of 26.95 Mbps. Hot on their heels was Vodacom, followed by the newer network Rain, with Telkom and Cell C rounding out the bottom. To put it simply, if you were on Cell C back then, you were waiting a lot longer for your downloads.

Latency? MTN Again!

Latency measures how long it takes before the network starts downloading your data. The lower the latency, the faster you’ll get going. MTN also nailed this, coming in with the lowest latency, making them the best overall performer.

So, Who Won?

With top ratings in both speed and latency, MTN officially claimed the title of South Africa’s Best Mobile Network. After a big push to improve their 3G and 4G coverage, they managed to overtake Vodacom, who had been leading for most of 2018.

Here’s how the top two compared:

• MTN: 26.95 Mbps download speed, 37ms latency
• Vodacom: 26.78 Mbps download speed, 39ms latency

Yes, MTN only just beat Vodacom, but a win is a win!

Cell C... Ouch

Unfortunately for Cell C customers, things weren’t looking so good. Cell C had the slowest speeds and the highest latency, meaning you’d have to wait twice as long to download the same file as you would on MTN. Even Telkom beat Cell C, although they didn’t do much better, just scraping ahead in latency.

A surprising entry in the middle of the pack was Rain. Launched in mid-2018 as a data-only network, Rain already showed it was serious competition for Telkom and Cell C.

The Scores Are In

Each network was given a “Network Quality Score” based on how they performed in speed and latency compared to MTN, which set the benchmark with a perfect 10. Here’s how the rankings looked:

Vodacom had been on top for most of 2018, but MTN’s massive network improvements towards the end of the year saw them snatch the title of Best Mobile Network in South Africa in early 2019.