October 2020
In the latest Mobile Experience Snapshot for South Africa, MTN won in four out of five metrics tested, including highest Excellent Consistent Quality and fastest median download speed. Telkom had the most responsive network in the country.
MTN had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality
In Common Coverage Areas across South Africa, MTN had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality at 73.2%, meaning subscribers had a network experience suitable for use-cases like 1080p video streaming, real-time mobile gaming or HD video calling. With only 5.8% separating the two, Vodacom was in second place with an Excellent Consistent Quality of 67.4%. Telkom and Cell C were in third and fourth place with a difference in performance against MTN at 18.5% and 25.9%, respectively.
In regards to Core Consistent Quality, meaning subscribers had a network connection that met the requirements for use-cases like SD video streaming, social media sharing and web browsing, no operator in South Africa reached the 90% threshold. However, MTN had the highest Core Consistent Quality at 82.9% and Cell C was in last place with a difference in performance of 21.2%.
You can learn more about Tutela’s consistent quality metrics here.
MTN had fastest median download and upload speed
In the speed test, MTN had the fastest median download speed in Common Coverage Areas across South Africa with 25.6 Mbps, 16.2 Mbps faster than last place Telkom.
MTN also had the fastest median upload speed in the country at 11.8 Mbps, however the competition was much tighter with last place Telkom only 6.9 Mbps slower than MTN.
Telkom had best latency result
Telkom had the most responsive network in Common Coverage Areas across South Africa at 17.8 ms, however the competition was tight with only 4.2 ms separating last place Cell C from Telkom.
Our findings for South Africa are based on 34.3 billion network quality measurements including 2.93 million speed tests between July and September 2020. Our latest complimentary Mobile Experience Report is available to download from the Tutela Insights portal.