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Cool Ideas and MTN top the charts in Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence report

The firm behind a website you’ve likely visited on multiple occasions – Speedtest.net – has published its Speedtest Intelligence report for the second quarter of the year.

The report reveals which internet service providers offer the highest speeds and lowest latency as well as data for which cities have the fastest internet, on average.

Let’s start with fixed broadband.

South Africa ranks 85th on Ookla’s charts for fixed broadband with average download speeds of 47.32Mbps, average upload speeds of 33.51Mbps and average latency of 22ms.

Before we take a look at individual ISPs and how they scored we should share how Ookla determines a Speed Score for an ISP.

“Speed Score incorporates a measure of each provider’s download and upload speed to rank network performance (90% of the final Speed Score is attributed to download speed and the remaining 10% to upload speed, because online experiences are typically more affected by download speed). Speed Score uses a modified trimean to combine speeds from the 10th percentile, 50th percentile (also known as the median) and 90th percentile in a weighted average using a 1:8:1 ratio, respectively. We place the most emphasis on the median speeds as those represent what most network providers’ customers will experience on a day-to-day basis,” the firm explains.

Fixed Broadband
Provider Speed Score Mean Latency (ms)
Cool Ideas 45.76 9
Afrihost 35.79 15
Webafrica 34.21 13
Vox Telecom 32.63 17
Axxess 30.02 19
MWEB 26.87 16
rain 24.35 41
Telkom 20.04 31
HeroTel 14.76 26

When it comes to fixed line broadband, Cool Ideas wins in both Speed Scores and Latency. While HeroTel has the lowest Speed Score, the Mean Latency result from rain is just horrible. As you will see later, even mobile network operators performed better in terms of latency, with rain only beating one of the mobile networks in Speed Score, and it wasn’t by much.

Ookla also measure the consistency of an operator’s performance and in that regard, Cool Ideas wins out again.

Fixed Broadband
Provider Consistency Score
Cool Ideas 65.4%
Webafrica 57.6%
Afrihost 57.3%
Vox Telecom 53.9%
Axxess 49.3%
MWEB 41.1%
Telkom 37.1%
rain 34.7%
HeroTel 32.5%

Mobile broadband results

As a whole, South Africa ranks 56th in the world for mobile broadband connectivity. According to Ookla, the average download speed is 44.60Mbps, average upload is 11.22Mbps and latency sits at 30ms.

How do our local mobile network operators perform compared to that average? See for yourself.

Mobile Broadband
Provider Speed Score Mean Latency (ms)
MTN 60.44 29
Vodacom 35.38 29
Telkom 26.07 26
Cell C 23.53 37

MTN is clearly the winner by a country mile although Telkom does have slightly better latency. Those 3ms Telkom has does come at the cost of raw upload and download speed though.

Mobile Broadband
Provider Consistency Score
MTN 90.5%
Telkom 86.8%
Vodacom 83.7%
Cell C 79.2%

MTN not only has better speeds and an agreeable latency but it also performs as advertised 90 percent of the time. We might just have to switch networks on the back of this news.

Finally, taking a look at internet speeds from a geographic perspective, Johannesburg is the place to be if you need fast internet be it fixed or mobile.

We can gauge some interesting information from these graphs. For example, the mobile internet experience in Soweto is likely to be very poor given the low download and upload speeds. In fact, mobile internet as a whole in South Africa is rather poor with upload speeds being particularly bad across the board. No wonder so many livestreams going out over mobile internet are so bad.

We can also how fibre is going in terms of rollout. While we hesitate to say that Johannesburg, Pretoria and Soweto is leading the way when it comes to fibre deployments as the speeds could be a result of many factors, we can confidently say that there is an appetite for faster internet here in the Northern interior of the country while those at the coast continue on with lower speeds.

Overall, this data should help you find the best ISP in your area though, as always, your mileage may vary.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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