Best ADSL ISP in South Africa

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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With a multitude of ADSL ISPs in South Africa it can be a daunting task to select the right package and the right service provider.

The performance of an ISPs is very difficult to gauge without using the service first, but public forums such as MyBroadband can help to see what subscribers say.

Another method is to look at the Speedtest.net results which are made available through Ookla’s Net Index which lists service providers according to average upload and download speeds.

Filtered results

Many consumers and broadband service providers have complained that Ookla’s Net Index results may be skewed with tests conducted from a core network rather than a broadband connection.

Ookla’s CEO Doug Suttles explains that they don’t really see the problem with ‘testing from a core network’ in larger volume testing countries since the number of tests compiled into the indexes is so massive that it is not viable to try and “game the system.”

Despite Suttles’ reassurance, MyBroadband used the latest Speedtest.net results and filtered out the obvious core network tests to compare ADSL ISP speeds.

The following table provides the average download and upload speeds of South Africa’s prominent consumer ISPs.

Different ADSL speeds

The various maximum ADSL line speeds – 384Kbps, 1Mbps, 4Mbps and 10Mbps – create complications when it comes to average ADSL speeds.

A service provider with many 384Kbps DSL customers (such as Telkom and MWEB) is at a big disadvantage when competing against a service provider with mostly 4Mbps and 10Mbps subscribers.

MyBroadband set out to filter results based on ADSL line speeds using a short survey before a test is conducted, and the following table provides an overview of the latest local and international download results.

MyBroadband explained that this is only the first step to get the most accurate speed test results possible, and that the next phase of improvements are already being worked on.

Tags: adsl, Headline