SA’s fastest broadband services revealed

James Etherington-Smith

James is journalist and sub-editor at MyBroadband, and editor at MyGaming. He is an avid gamer with an exceptional knowledge about gaming and related hardware...

Full Profile

E-mail

The 2010 Broadband Survey was conducted last month and attracted a total of 1908 broadband users who completed the survey.

Consumers rated their broadband service and their service provider according to a variety of criteria including support, service levels and overall satisfaction.

As part of the survey broadband subscribers conducted two web based speed tests and recorded their local and international download and upload speeds. These tests used the Speedtest.net servers.

Results

The average download speed for all broadband services in South Africa was 2.17 Mbps for local connectivity and 1.3 Mbps for international speed tests.

When it came to uplink speeds an average of 0.5 Mbps was achieved using local Speedtest.net servers and 0.32 Mbps using international servers.

The newly launched Cell C HSPA+ offering had the highest downlink speeds of 7.21 Mbps for local tests and 2.47 Mbps for international tests. Cell C’s HSPA+ achieved uplink speeds of 2.01 Mbps locally and 1.03 Mbps internationally.

It should be noted that Cell C is still in the process of rolling out its HSPA+ network with very few subscribers on the network, which means that their results may be slightly skewed when compared to other more established broadband providers and services.

It is not surprising that Telkom’s DSL384 and DSL512 services produced the worst results – purely based on the service descriptions rather than poor performance of the services.

The following table provide an overview of the speed test results of the 2010 Broadband Survey:

SA’s fastest broadband services revealed << Comments and views