Afrihost overtakes RSAWeb and Webafrica in battle for top South African ISP

The top-rated Internet service provider in South Africa is Cool Ideas, followed by Afrihost and RSAWeb, Analytico’s quarterly customer satisfaction report reveals.

Analytico is a research company that provides market research, network intelligence, and marketing insights to South African IT and telecommunications companies.

Its research reports and insights portal use real-world tests, crowdsourced data, consumer surveys, and face-to-face interviews with executives.

Quarterly ISP rankings are based on Analytico’s speed tests and customer satisfaction ratings collected through the MyBroadband Speedtest app between 1 July 2022 and 30 September 2022.

MyBroadband’s speed test servers are hosted in Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centres, guaranteeing a neutral testing environment.

Through Teraco’s NAPAfrica Internet exchange, network operators have a free 10Gbps connection to MyBroadband’s speed test platform at its peering points.

Cool Ideas topped the list of large ISPs with an average customer satisfaction rating of 87.9%, an increase from its 86% rating last quarter.

It is the only ISP with an average rating exceeding 80% and the only larger ISP in the ranking that exclusively offers fibre services.

Focusing on residential and business fibre services lets Cool Ideas specialise and avoid customer service issues that could come with Telkom’s old DSL network, and 4G and 5G wireless broadband products.

Afrihost jumped to second place with 75.2%, overtaking RSAWeb (74.3%), while Webafrica (71.8%) slid down the table.

Cell C remains at the bottom of the rankings, although its rating improved from 57% last quarter to 62.6% during Q3.

Rain’s rating has continued to improve steadily, with the 4G and 5G cellular data network provider narrowing the gap between it and Vodacom.

Some prominent ISPs recorded too few votes during the quarter to be included in the main rankings and are shown in the second table.

It should be noted that, due to the low number of votes, the average rating of ISPs in the second table is not necessarily an accurate reflection of their performance.

Among these smaller ISPs, Atomic Access topped the rankings.

The full rankings and other information are available from Analytico.

Top ISPs in South Africa

The table below provides summarises the average customer satisfaction ratings of South Africa’s prominent ISPs.