Truth about Internet access in South Africa
Almost three-quarters of South Africans have access to the Internet using a mobile phone, while only 14.5% have a fixed home Internet connection.
This is according to an analysis from The Outlier, based on the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa’s recently published 2025 State of the ICT Sector in South Africa report.
The Outlier found that home Internet figures are skewed by higher numbers in the Western Cape and Gauteng.
In most other provinces, the proportion of people with fixed home Internet is under 10% — usually by a significant margin.
The two primary fixed home Internet technologies in South Africa are fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) and fixed wireless access (FWA). FWA includes cellular-based networks like 4G and 5G, as well as other technologies.
While FTTH provides South Africans with stable and affordable uncapped Internet, the technology is not always feasible to deploy, opening the door to competing FWA services.
According to BMIT’s South African Broadband Report for 2024, of the 3.2 million addressable homes in the upper-income South African market, 3.1 million have access to at least one fibre network operator (FNO).
The report found that 48.7% upper-income homes have been connected. However, BMIT’s research shows that these figures rapidly drop for the middle and lower income brackets.
Only 2.2 million of the 4.3 million addressable middle-income homes have been passed, and 16.5% have been connected.
According to BMIT, there are 5 million addressable lower-income homes. However, only 100,000 have been passed, and 0.4% are connected to a network.
This means South Africans who would like to use FTTH services may be unable to access them because of this constraint, leaving them looking for alternatives such as LTE and 5G.
BMIT’s 2023 version of the report found that fixed-LTE was by far the leading broadband medium in South Africa, which can primarily be attributed to its broad population coverage.
Mobile operators like MTN and Vodacom offer this service and spend billions on expanding and maintaining networks that cover roughly 99% of the country’s population.
Newer market entrant Rain has built its own 4G and 5G networks to offer wireless broadband and has since begun offering full mobile services on its 4G network.
While fixed-5G and LTE access may be readily available and easy to set up, often as simple as slotting a SIM card into a router, they are more vulnerable to external factors that may degrade performance.
5G access in South Africa
Icasa’s 2025 State of the ICT Sector in South Africa report also noted that almost all of South Africa’s urban residents are currently covered by 3G and 4G, and included 5G coverage statistics.
5G coverage is highest in the Western Cape and Gauteng, and significantly lower in the Northern Cape and Free State.
South Africa’s major network operators radically expanded their mobile 5G connectivity and performance in the past two years.
Vodacom was the first to launch commercial mobile 5G services in the country in June 2020. By the end of 2024, its 5G network reached over half the population, up from 30% a year ago.
Vodacom said its 5G deployment strategy was driven by customer and use-case demand and that it prioritised the new technology in areas where subscribers needed it most.
MTN South Africa previously told MyBroadband that increasing its 5G footprint was one of its main focuses for 2025, while it was also exploring the possibilities of 5.5G technology.
“The expansion of our 5G network is determined by various factors — one of them being the commercial 5G ecosystem device growth on the network,” MTN said.
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