When it comes to selecting an internet service provider there are many aspects to consider but speed, latency and the consistency of the experience are important.
Unfortunately, for the most part, you won’t know about these aspects of connectivity until you start using the internet service so it’s great then that a third party is able to provide insight into how various ISPs perform.
To that end, Ookla, the folks behind Speedtest.net, have published its market analysis of local ISPs – both fixed line and mobile – for the first quarter of the year.
For South Africans looking for the fastest speeds, Ookla found that Cool Ideas offered the fastest median speeds with a median of 46.05Mbps. The ISP tied with Webafrica for median latency with 4ms but once again trounced others in the consistency test in which it scored 73.22 percent. Consistency is determined by how many subscribers have at least 25Mbps download speed and 3Mbps upload speed.
You can see how each of the ISPs analysed by Ookla performed in the table below.
| ISP | Median Download Speed (Mbps) | Latency (ms) | Consistency Score |
| Cool Ideas | 46.05 | 4 | 73.20% |
| Afrihost | 37.79 | 5 | 65.30% |
| Webafrica | 37.14 | 4 | 67.70% |
| Axxess | 35.07 | 6 | 59.80% |
| Vox Telecom | 34.8 | 5 | 64% |
| rain | 31.95 | 23 | 41.40% |
| MWEB | 27.7 | 6 | 52.20% |
| Telkom | 22.02 | 10 | 43.60% |
| HeroTel | 20.4 | 14 | 46.80% |
As for mobile internet service providers, MTN was found to have the fastest median speed of 51.76Mbps. On the other end of the spectrum, Cell C only managed a median download speed of 16.34Mbps.
| Mobile ISP | Median Download Speed (Mbps) | Latency (ms) | Consistency Score |
| MTN | 51.76 | 23 | 88.10% |
| Vodacom | 36.17 | 23 | 84.30% |
| Telkom | 21.74 | 19 | 87% |
| Cell C | 16.34 | 29 | 73.60% |
Looking specifically at 5G connectivity, MTN beat Vodacom out with a median download speed of 213.37Mbps compared to Vodacom’s 132.11Mbps.
These numbers are agreeable and combined with advice from techies, you should be a bit more informed when shopping for an ISP.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
