More Axxess LTE Disappointment

[benniejohn]

I would like to check whether others have had a similar experience with Axxess LTE. We are in a remote area where fiber is expensive for what you get, so I rely on LTE. I tested both MTN and Vodacom over a few months before moving to an Axxess Home LTE package.

Initially, performance was good. However, during the March outage (almost 5 days), I eventually tested my Vodacom SIM (MTN was being used for failover at the time) and confirmed that the Vodacom mobile data network itself was fully operational. Since then, Axxess performance has been consistently and repeatably poor:

• Axxess (their APN) delivers ~33%–50% of Vodacom’s download speeds
• Upload speeds are roughly identical, which is strange but says it is not a signal problem, it is closer to throttling
• The package is marketed as unthrottled up to 450GB

I have raised this with Axxess multiple times. To date, no technical explanation has been provided beyond attributing it to Vodacom and general network performance. This does not hold up — I have repeatedly switched SIMs within minutes and rerun the same tests, with Vodacom consistently delivering roughly double the speed of Axxess.

Given that:

• The Vodacom SIM performs normally under the same conditions
• MTN performance is the same as Vodacom, mostly a bit slower, but stable.
• The Axxess degradation is consistent and measurable

This does not appear to be a transient or purely technical issue. At this stage, it raises questions around traffic shaping, prioritisation, or other forms of undisclosed limitation. Whether this is misconfiguration, incompetence, or something more deliberate remains unclear. In my view, this looks like a bait and switch deal that may require formal investigation.

Has anyone else observed similar behaviour with Axxess LTE in the city or other remote areas?