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We searched for the cheapest LTE SIM around, here’s what we found

Mobile broadband is wonderful in that you don’t need to sit around waiting for a technician to physically install connectivity.

This, in addition to ever increasing availability of LTE and LTE-A in South Africa, means that more and more folks are able to get broadband internet at home even if there isn’t a fibre or old school copper cabling nearby.

The pay off for this is that there are a lot of options when it comes to selecting a service provider.

This week we decided we need some LTE connectivity in our lives as a sort of backup for when our fixed line ADSL goes to pot.

So, after discussing what we’d need, we decided that we should budget for 1GB per day for 30 days in the event our fixed line connectivity fails spectacularly. After having a quick look around we decided to compare 20GB, 25GB and 30GB packages from various service providers as this would suit our needs.

With this in mind we have selected the cheapest packages available from these service providers which fit those data limitations. Note that more packages are available from these providers we have just selected the cheapest which met our needs.

This data is correct as of 12th July 2018.

Provider Price Plan Data Allocation Cost per month Extras
Webafrica Cell C 20GB R219
Axxess Cell C 20GB R219
Ignite Cell C 20GB R219
Vodacom MyGig 20 20GB R504 20GB Night Owl Data
Cell C Cell C LTE-A 25GB R241.10
Afrihost Fixed Wireless 25GB R299 1 Month Free Data and a modem
Webafrica rain 25GB R299
Vox LTE 25GB R299 Delivery @ R200
Telkom SmartBroadband Wireless 30GB R555
MTN MTN Made for Home 30GB R669 30GB Night Express Data
rain Just the SIM 30GB R1 500 R120 once off

As you can see from table Cell C’s 20GB package through Webafrica, Axxess and Ignite comes out as the cheapest at R219. While Vodacom charges an incredible R504 that includes an additional 20GB of Night Data that can be used between 12am and 5am.

For 25GB Cell C is still the cheapest at R241.10 but Afrihost’s package includes 1 month of free data and a modem, which we’d argue is a good deal if you don’t have one.

Then for the 30GB package.

You’ll notice that rain is much more expensive than the other options. rain has an interesting business model in that you only pay for what you use. While that is nice with data priced at R50 per gigabyte your rain bill can get out of hand rather quickly if you don’t keep a close eye on it.

So Telkom’s offer is cheaper but MTN’s includes an additional 30GB of Night Express Data. Since we don’t really care too much about night time surfing (given we’d need this during working hours) Telkom wins this round but your requirements may vary.

From our shopping we’ve determined that Cell C is the cheapest LTE SIM available in South Africa when looking solely at monthly fees with Telkom coming second purely because it offers the upper limit of 30GB we’d need at the cheapest price.

We must point out that this pricing guide does not include SIM and connection fees which differ from service provider to service provider. As with anything we recommend reading the terms and conditions of a service thoroughly before signing any sort of contract, even if it is month to month.

 

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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