Telecommunications group MTN has secured the title of the best mobile network in South Africa from the quarterly MyBroadband Insights report.
The first quarter Mobile Network Quality Report showed that MTN achieved a network quality score of 9.73, followed by Vodacom with a score of 5.65, Telkom with 5.17, Cell C with 4.36 and Rain with 3.40.
MTN had the highest average download speed at 64.29 Mb/s, followed by Vodacom with a speed of 32.76 Mb/s, Telkom at 27.83 Mb/s, Cell C with 20.82 Mb/s and Rain with 10.58 Mb/s.
Overall, South Africa had an average mobile download speed of 33.23 Mb/s and an average upload speed of 12.71 Mb/s.
The report, which is based on 349 575 speed tests done by thousands of MyBroadband Speed Test App users across South Africa between January 1 and March 31, highlighted the significantly higher speeds of all the mobile operators, barring Rain, compared with a year ago.
“MTN’s exceptional performance is a result of a R50-billion infrastructure investment over the past five years to extend coverage, improve network quality, and increase speeds,” the report said.
The network performances improved despite a significant increase in traffic, owing to the release of temporary spectrum which was issued to mobile operators during the lockdown which enabled the operators to increase their network capacity and improve their average speeds during the lockdown.
“Rain was the only operator whose year-on-year performance declined. Its average download speed plummeted from 15.20 Mb/s in the first quarter of 2020 to 10.58 Mb/s in the first quarter of 2021.”
The report said the decline in network performance was likely a result of network congestion in some areas because of higher subscriber numbers.