- Opensignal has released its latest report looking at the quality of mobile experience offered by South African networks.
- The report specifically looked at Cell C, MTN, Telkom, and Vodacom over a period of 90 days starting 1st November 2022.
- Opensignal also broke down performance based on general overall speed and 5G speed.
This week independent wireless analytics firm Opensignal released its latest Mobile Network Experience report for South Africa, looking at the country’s four largest operators and ranking which serves up the best mobile experience in SA.
To that end, the firm looked at Cell C, MTN, Telkom, and Vodacom over a period of 90 days starting 1st November last year.
In terms of best mobile experience, unfortunately Cell C did not score well enough in any particular category to warrant a significant mention in the report. As expected, the two largest players – Vodacom and MTN – duked it out for the most part, with Telkom scoring high in the availability segment.
Here Opensignal says Telkom, “Users connect to 3G or better services 97.9% of the time — the best result in South Africa. This is around 2.8 percentage points higher than on MTN and Vodacom’s network, which are in a statistical tie for second place.”
As for the other categories, Vodacom performed extremely well in the 5G department. While it was tie with MTN in the previous report, this latest one sees Vodacom achieve, “A stunning increase of average 5G download speeds of 66.6 Mbps — 45.8% faster compared to the last time,” the firm explained.
“Vodacom pulls ahead of MTN which saw no statistically significant change in its score compared to our llast report. As a result, Vodacom breaks out of the statistical tie it was in with MTN and wins 5G Download Speed outright with a score of 212.2Mbps, commanding an impressive lead of nearly 30% over its competitor,” it added.
Sticking with the competitor, it nabbed top honours when it comes to 5G gaming, however Vodacom did win in terms of overall experience in gaming. That said, MTN was awarded the top performer when it comes to fastest overall speeds.
“After sharing the podium for 5G Games Experience with Vodacom in the last report, MTN wins the award outright with a score of 39.5 points. Vodacom comes second, 1.2 points behind the winner,” noted Opensignal.
“MTN users see the fastest average overall download and upload speeds in South Africa. The operator wins Download Speed Experience outright with speeds clocking in at 29Mbps — 3.9Mbps (15.4%) faster than Vodacom’s result of 25.1Mbps,” it added.
While there is indeed wins for both of the biggest networks in the country when it comes to the best mobile experience, in our opinion the one metric missing is cost. With Vodacom, MTN, and Telkom all upping prices in recent weeks, speed is certainly important, but affordability ranks a bit higher in our books.
As such, it will be interesting to see which network performs well by that metric this year.
To read the report in full, head here.
[Header Image – Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash]
[Inline Images – Opensignal]
