South African fibre price war — MetroFibre pulls out the big guns

MetroFibre offers the cheapest fibre-to-the-home packages among South Africa’s major open-access fibre network operators, a MyBroadband comparison shows.

In May 2022, MetroFibre shook up its fibre package structure — the operator doubled all its packages’ speeds without raising prices and introduced 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps products.

This comparison confirms MetroFibre’s claims that these changes would make it one of the most competitive fibre operators in the market.

We compared prices on five of South Africa’s prominent fibre network operators (FNOs) — Frogfoot, MetroFibre, Octotel, Openserve, and Vumatel.

The Internet service providers (ISPs) we used for pricing were Afrihost, Cool Ideas, and RSAWeb.

ISPs generally offered the cheapest pricing on MetroFibre, with some exceptions.

For example, Afrihost’s 200 Mbps Frogfoot package was R1,047 per month compared to MetroFibre’s R1,097 offer.

However, Metrofibre’s new 500 Mbps service from Afrihost and Cool Ideas is cheaper than Frogfoot and Openserve’s equivalent packages.

In addition, Openserve’s upload speed on its 500 Mbps service is lower than Metrofibre’s and Frogfoot’s.

When it comes to the 1 Gbps product category, MetroFibre does not fare as well against its competitors.

Although Metrofibre offered faster upload speeds on its 1 Gbps product, its prices were also substantially higher than the other players — including Frogfoot, which offers symmetrical upload speeds.

The table below summarises the prices Afrihost, Cool Ideas, and RSAWeb offer on five different major fibre network operators.

Now read: Fibre price war in South Africa — MetroFibre throws down the gauntlet