How long it will take to bust your data cap
Uncapped broadband connections became popular in South Africa after MWEB launched the country’s first affordable unlimited ADSL products in March 2010.
While many ADSL users now enjoy the freedom which an uncapped broadband connection brings, many others have capped accounts and have to constantly monitor their usage.
South African mobile broadband products have particularly low usage limits – most subscribers have 3GB of data or less per month.
While mobile data prices and bundle sizes stayed relatively stable over the last few years, speeds increased massively. Bandwidth-intensive services like video streaming also became very popular.
This means mobile data users can burn through their monthly allowance very quickly. 2GB of mobile data on a 100Mbps LTE connection, for example, will last less than 3 minutes at full speed.
The same holds for many other broadband connections, including fibre-to-the-home (FTTH).
MTN, for example, is offering a 20Mbps FTTH service with 20GB of data per month. At full speed this data will only last around 2 hours.
The following table provides an overview of how long the caps of some commercial data products will last at full speed.
| How long your cap will last | |||
| Service | Peak speed | Monthly data cap | Time to hit monthly cap at peak speed |
| Vodacom LTE | 100Mbps | 0.5GB | 1 minute, 20 seconds |
| Telkom LTE | 100Mbps | 3GB | 4 minutes, 0 seconds |
| Telkom LTE Advanced | 150Mbps | 100GB | 1 hour, 29 minutes |
| MTN FTTH | 20Mbps | 20GB | 2 hours, 13 minutes |
| Telkom FTTH | 100Mbps | 200GB | 4 hours, 27 minutes |
| Telkom VDSL | 40Mbps | 100GB | 5 hours, 33 minutes |
| Neotel Neoflex Data | 3Mbps | 10GB | 7 hours, 24 minutes |
| Telkom ADSL | 10Mbps | 50GB | 11 hours, 7 minutes |
| iBurst Wireless | 2Mbps | 5GB | 2 days, 8 hours |
Check how long your data cap will last
Adjust the sliders on the MyBroadband data usage tool below to see how long your cap will last.
Loading ...