July 2020
In the latest Mobile Experience Report for South Africa, MTN was found to have the highest Excellent Consistent Quality in the country with 83.3%. The operator also had both the fastest median download and upload speed, however Telkom had the best one-way latency result.
MTN had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality
In Common Coverage Areas across South Africa, MTN had the highest Excellent Consistent Quality in the country with 83.3% of tests good enough for applications like HD video calling, movie streaming, or mobile gaming. Vodacom was close behind by 8.6% for an Excellent Consistent Quality of 74.7%. Cell C was in third with 68.6% and Telkom in fourth with 60.7%.
In regards to Core Consistent Quality, MTN had the highest Core percentage in Common Coverage Areas across South Africa with 96.4%. Vodacom and Cell C were close behind MTN with only a difference of 2.5% and 3.4%, respectively. Despite the 22.6% difference between MTN and Telkom for Excellent, Telkom had a smaller gap for Core with a percentage of 88.8%, a difference of only 7.6%.
You can learn more about Tutela’s consistent quality metrics here.
MTN had fastest median download and upload speed
In regards to speeds, MTN had the fastest median download speed in South Africa with 18.8 Mbps. With 5.3 Mbps difference, Vodacom came in second place with a median download speed of 13.5 Mbps. From there, Cell C and Telkom fell away from the competition, with Cell C behind MTN by 10.7 Mbps, and Telkom behind MTN by 11 Mbps.
MTN also had the fastest upload speed in the country with 9.2 Mbps. Vodacom had a difference of 2.3 Mbps behind first place MTN for an upload speed of 6.9 Mbps, followed by Cell C with a difference of 4.5 Mbps, and Telkom in fourth with a difference of 4.7 Mbps.
Telkom had best latency result
Despite its last place ranking in the other metrics tested, Telkom was in first place for the best one-way latency result in the country with 18.5 ms. The difference in performance was small however, with MTN only 2.1 ms behind first place Telkom. Only 0.3 Mbps separated Vodacom from MTN, and Cell C was in fourth place for a one-way latency result of 22.3 ms, 3.8 ms behind Telkom.
Our findings for South Africa are based on 27.1 billion network quality measurements including 734 million speed tests between April and June 2020. Our latest complimentary Mobile Experience Report is available to download from the Tutela Insights portal.