South Africa
Opensignal is the independent global standard for analyzing consumers' connectivity experiences. Our industry reports are the definitive guide to understanding what happens when people use their mobile and broadband connections in their daily life.
South Africa
Opensignal is the independent global standard for analyzing consumers' connectivity experiences. Our industry reports are the definitive guide to understanding what happens when people use their mobile and broadband connections in their daily life.
Key Findings
National
Vox has South Africa’s Best Home Internet
Vox has South Africa’s Best Home Internet and takes the leadership in all five core metrics — Download Speed Experience, Upload Speed Experience, Reliability Experience, Video Experience and Consistent Quality.
Vox tops both speed metrics, with its strongest lead in Upload Speed.
Vox wins both Speed awards. It places first on Download Speed with 24.9Mbps, narrowly ahead of rain’s 23.9Mbps, but its lead is far more pronounced on Upload Speed, where it reaches 17.5Mbps — 6.4Mbps ahead of Vodacom and 6.9Mbps ahead of HeroTel.
Vox leads on Consistent Quality, reflecting a more consistently usable experience.
Vox wins the Consistent Quality award with 55.8% of tests meeting the minimum recommended performance thresholds to watch HD video, complete group video conference calls and play games. It finishes ahead of HeroTel’s 51.7% and Vodacom’s 51.3%, indicating a more consistently usable experience.
Vox comes first for Reliability Experience and Video Experience
Vox has the most reliable fixed broadband network, winning the Reliability Experience award with a score of 363 points on a 100–1000 scale — ahead of rain’s 332 and HeroTel’s 330. Vox also wins Video Experience with 66.1 points, beating rain’s 62.9 and HeroTel’s 61.1. Opensignal’s Reliability Experience metric measures how consistently a household can connect to the internet and successfully complete tasks, while Video Experience reflects the quality of video streaming over home broadband.
rain places second for Download Speed, Reliability Experience and Video Experience
rain places second for Download Speed, Reliability Experience and Video Experience. Opensignal users on rain record average download speeds of 23.9Mbps, while the operator scores 332 points for Reliability Experience and 62.9 points for Video Experience — second only to Vox in all three categories.
Market Overview
South Africa’s fixed broadband market is expanding rapidly, The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) reported strong growth in 2025, with fixed broadband subscriptions rising 19.3% year on year to 3.26 million and FTTH/B subscriptions increasing 22% to 3.01 million. Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) is also becoming more important, with subscriptions reaching 1.26 million, up 39% year on year. This shows that the market is expanding through both fiber and fixed wireless, with the latter offering a faster and lower-cost way to connect homes. However, the fixed internet at home remains limited as the percentage of households with internet access specifically at home accounts for 17.4% according to South Africa’s (Stats SA) General Household Survey (GHS) 2024 report.
This market dynamic is also shaping operator strategy, Vox reports that its home fiber offer covers all nine provinces and spans speeds from 4Mbps to 1Gbps. In late 2025 it launched Kiwi Wireless as a fiber-like home broadband product with 50Mbps, 100Mbps and up to 200Mbps tiers, which targets households where fiber is unavailable or uneconomic to deploy. In February 2026, Vox became a Google Verified Peering Provider strengthening direct connectivity to Google services which may help support a better customer quality of experience.
rain’s position in the market is most closely tied to FWA, with a market strategy centered on 5G home broadband rather than fiber resale. Its current rainOne proposition combines unlimited 5G home Wi-Fi with bundled mobile value, while newer devices such as the101 pro, the101 xtender and rain Loop broaden that strategy into a wider wireless home-and-mobile ecosystem.
HeroTel, the third largest fiber network operator, fixed broadband story is one of expansion beyond the major metros. It currently operates in more than 500 towns and municipalities, across all nine provinces. As of June 2025, as per Telegeography, the company claimed to pass 585,981 homes with its fiber networks, serving just under 300,000 users. Herotel attracted strong national interest as it scaled with Vumatel first acquiring a 45% non-controlling stake in 2022 to support network expansion, and likely moving to full ownership in 2025. While Herotel says its rural and low-income market focus will remain unchanged.
Vodacom’s fixed broadband position strengthened meaningfully with the start of its effective 30% stake in Maziv on 1 December 2025, giving it exposure to one of South Africa’s largest open-access fiber networks with a FTTH footprint of more than 2.8 million homes passed. As of March 2025, Vodacom reached 198,000 homes and businesses, while its own fiber network had passed nearly 166,000 homes and businesses.
Telkom remains the clearest scale player in South African fixed broadband, supported by the strength of its Openserve network. In Q3 FY2026, Openserve exceeded 1.5 million homes passed and increased homes connected to 786,490, with an industry-leading 52.4% connectivity rate. On the retail side, Telkom also continued to grow, reporting in its Q1 FY2026, a 6.6% increase in fiber subscribers and 11.6% growth in fiber revenue in Q1 FY2026.
MTN’s fixed broadband strategy in South Africa is increasingly centered on a combined Home model of FWA plus fiber. In H1 2025, MTN reported FWA subscribers grew 29.6% supported by 5G population coverage of 57%. By Q3 2025, its Home customer base across FWA and fiber had grown 30% year on year to 344,000 from 264,000. Together, these results show MTN using fixed broadband as an important part of a broader converged growth strategy rather than as a standalone retail story.
In this report, Opensignal examines real-world data from our South Africa’s fixed-line broadband users. To reflect the various ways in which fixed broadband is used, we include five different measures of user experience: Consistent Quality, Download Speed, Upload Speed, Video Experience, and Reliability Experience. Together, these measures capture the wide range of ways households use broadband services — from remote work and education to video streaming and gaming.
National Fixed Broadband Experience
Category description:
The experience of our users across all of the broadband access delivery technologies used by the providers.
Definitions
Broadband Consistent Quality measures how often a network, from the perspective of a single device once connectivity is established, meets the requirements for common applications. Broadband Consistent Quality uses six key performance indicators: download and upload speeds, latency, jitter, packet loss, and time to first byte, setting thresholds appropriate for individual rather than multiple device usage. Metrics represent the percentage of users’ tests meeting these performance thresholds to support activities like watching HD video, completing group video calls, and gaming across all hours of the day.
Definitions
Measured in Mbps, Broadband Download Speed represents the typical everyday speeds a user experiences across a provider’s network.
Definitions
Measured in Mbps, Broadband Upload Speed measures the average upload speeds for each internet service provider observed by our users across their fixed networks. Typically, upload speeds are slower than download speeds, but this often depends on the technology used for broadband connections.
Definitions
Opensignal’s adaptive video experience quantifies the quality of video streamed to mobile devices by measuring real-world video streams over an operator's network. The metric measures users’ adaptive video experience using a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) approach inspired by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) studies which have derived a relationship between technical parameters of adaptive bitrate video streaming and the perceived video experience as reported by real people.
The videos tested are streamed directly from the world’s largest video content providers and include a wide selection of resolutions that dynamically match the network conditions, available bandwidth and device performance. Resolutions range from 144p to 2160p, which is also called 4K or UHD (Ultra High Definition). The model calculates a MOS score on a 0 to 100 scale by evaluating a number of parameters, including: the time to start playing the video, the quality of the video, the time playing each resolution, and the time spent re-buffering.
Definitions
Opensignal's Broadband Reliability Experience measures the ability of a household to connect to the internet and to successfully complete 'uninterrupted' tasks across multiple devices, encompassing work and recreational activities. While Reliability incorporates and expands upon elements akin to Broadband Consistent Quality, it uniquely includes assessments of initial connectivity and continuous completion of tasks, making it more comprehensive in scenarios involving multiple simultaneous connections.
Category description:
The experience of our users across fixed-line methods of broadband access delivery i.e. Fiber, xDSL, Cable (HFC).
Category description:
The experience of our users who are served by fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) where available from the provider, in comparison to other providers in the market.
Category description:
The experience of our users who are served by Fixed Wireless Access (FWA).
Related Analysis
Our Methodology
Collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally, Opensignal independently analyzes mobile and broadband user experience on every major network operator around the globe.
About Opensignal
Opensignal is the leading global provider of independent insights into consumers' connectivity experiences and choice of carrier. Our proprietary insights into mobile and broadband networks give operators the solutions they need to profitably compete and win, from executive level scorecards and public validation to pin-point level engineering analytics and consumer decision dynamics.
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Confidence Intervals
For every metric we calculate statistical confidence intervals indicated on our graphs. When confidence intervals overlap, our measured results are too close to declare a winner. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.
In our bar graphs we represent confidence intervals as boundaries on either sides of graph bars.
In our supporting-metric charts we show confidence intervals as +/- numerical values.
Why confidence intervals are vital in analyzing mobile network experience