Home Affairs Internet speeds worse than cheapest home broadband

The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) continues to use Internet connections with slower speeds than those of the cheapest broadband packages available to households in South Africa.

Furthermore, the technology it has chosen for some of these connections — DSL — has been all but eradicated for home users and replaced with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH).

DHA minister Leon Schreiber recently confirmed that some branches still used 2Mbps connections in an interview with Newzroom Africa.

While that is a marginal improvement from the lowest speed of 1Mbps that its offices had in 2022, it is well below the capabilities of common uncapped home broadband products in South Africa.

Since his appointment as home affairs minister in July 2024, Schreiber has set his sights on the severe system downtime issues experienced by DHA offices.

“It really is not acceptable. I would like to be the minister where the system is online, not offline,” Schreiber said.

The minister believes the below-par Internet connections are a fundamental part of the DHA’s systems regularly being slow or appearing offline.

Schreiber has engaged with communications minister Solly Malatsi to devise a more effective way for the department to work with the State Information Technology Agency (Sita), which procures connectivity services on behalf of state-run entities.

“It often creates a bottleneck. Home Affairs can’t solve some of these things. You have to go through Sita,” said Schreiber.

“So if we can get some more control over literally the Internet connections at our offices, you will see an improvement there.”

Sita previously said that the DHA had bought the cheapest possible DSL service with the lowest service-level agreement (SLA), which caused its prolonged downtime issues.

To illustrate how poor the 2Mbps speed used by some DHA offices truly is, MyBroadband compared it with broadband options available to general home users in South Africa in August 2024.

We collected three of the cheapest options available on all six broadband technologies accessible to households — DSL, FTTH, fixed-LTE, fixed-5G, fixed-wireless access (FWA), and satellite — which were advertised online.

We could not find any packages with the same 2Mbps speed as the DHA offices. The minimum speed across all options was 4Mbps.

Starting with fixed-line options, the slowest download speed available from major Internet service providers was 5Mbps on DSL and 4Mbps on fibre.

The latter was only available on minnow fibre network operator (FNO) Balwin Fibre, while all other FNOs featured packages with minimum speeds starting at 10Mbps.

Some of the offices might be in remote areas without fixed connectivity, so they would have to rely on a fixed-LTE, fixed-5G, FW, or satellite connection.

The slowest uncapped fixed-LTE packages support download speeds up to 10Mbps on MTN’s network, while the slowest speed for a fixed-5G package was 30Mbps on Rain’s network.

Hero Wireless offered the slowest uncapped FWA connection with 4Mbps download speeds, while the slowest uncapped home satellite package had a 5Mbps download speed, available through DSL Telecom on Eutelsat’s network.

The table below summarises some of the slowest uncapped Internet packages available to home users and how much they cost.

ISP/Network	Technology	Download speed	Fair usage policy	Price
Cool Ideas/Zoom Fibre	FTTH	15Mbps	None	R229
Hollywood Connect/Zoom Fibre	FTTH	15Mbps	None	R244
MTN	Fixed-LTE	10Mbps	After 400GB: 1Mbps	R269
Afrihost/Zoom Fibre	FTTH	15Mbps	None	R297
Afrihost/Openserve	Home DSL	5Mbps	None	R297
Axxess/Vodacom	Fixed-LTE	20Mbps	After 50GB: 2Mbps	R299
Vox/Openserve	Home DSL	5Mbps	None	R349
Supersonic/Air Fibre	FWA	5Mbps	None	R399
Axxess/MTN	Fixed-5G	500Mbps	After	R449
Telkom	Fixed-LTE	10Mbps	After 500GB: 4Mbps After 550GB: 2Mbps	R449
Hero Wireless	FWA	4Mbps	None	R499
Cybersmart	FWA	5Mbps	None	R578
Rain	Fixed-5G	30Mbps	None	R595
DSL Telecom	DSL	10Mbps	None	R625
Afrihost	Fixed-5G	50Mbps	After 1TB: 1Mbps	R749
DSL Telecom/Eutelsat	Satellite	5Mbps	After 100GB: 1.5Mbps After 200GB: 512kbps	R761
Morclick /Yahclick	Satellite	10Mbps	Unspecified	R999
Vox/Eutelsat	Satellite	10Mbps	After 100GB: 3Mbps After 150GB: 1.5Mbps	R1,873

While the above package comparison can be insightful, the DHA would likely have to use a business product, so comparing the prices would not be fair relative to what the DHA is paying for its 2Mbps lines.

Business-focused broadband packages come with additional benefits including service-level agreements (SLAs) providing better turnaround times for network issues or repairs.

There are very few providers that publicly advertise DSL products with pricing — apart from Telkom and Vox.

The table below compares the prices and speeds of business DSL packages available from Telkom and Vox with fibre-to-the-business (FTTB) packages from the same companies.

Openserve was used as the network because it is the sole DSL network provider.

ISP/Network	Technology	Entry-level download speed	Monthly price on 12 month-contract	Price per Mbps
Vox/Openserve	FTTB	50Mbps	R849	R16.98
Telkom/Openserve	FTTB	40Mbps	R715	R17.88
Vox Business/Openserve	DSL	5Mbps	R599	R119.80
Telkom Business/Openserve	DSL	5Mbps	R1,027	R205.40