Best Internet speeds for South African businesses

The ideal Internet speed for businesses in South Africa can vary greatly, but according to four major Internet service providers (ISPs), 50Mbps is generally the minimum for supporting efficient operations.

Business-oriented Internet services like fibre-to-the-business (FTTB) packages offer dedicated capacity and service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee high uptimes and help ensure minimal connection downtime.

Failure to meet an SLA’s requirements can result in penalties for the provider, providing peace of mind for a business concerned about empty promises.

However, FTTB and other business broadband products can be significantly more expensive than packages with equivalent speeds for residential consumers, like fibre-to-the-home (FTTH).

Therefore, selecting the best Internet speed for your business’s needs and affordability can be a major decision.

Two factors are critical when it comes to deciding on the speed you need.

Firstly, it is important to consider the applications, websites, or other online platforms that your business’s employees and visiting customers who may connect to your public-facing networks use daily.

Different Internet applications have widely varying bandwidth requirements.

Tasks such as emails and general Internet browsing are less data-intensive and can easily be done on connections with single Mbps speeds.

On the other hand, video calling and large file sharing require higher bandwidth and may strain single-Mbps connections if used by multiple people simultaneously.

Upload speeds are also important for these applications, which could inform your decision to use a symmetric or asymmetric connection.

The second major factor to consider is how many employees or customers you typically have at the business location at any given time, as they will share the total bandwidth of your connection.

Based on the factors above, it would generally not be a good idea for a business’s Internet speed to be lower than entry-level home broadband speeds.

For FTTH, this is typically 20Mbps to 25Mbps. 25Mbps also happens to be the US Federal Communication Commission’s minimum download speed for a connection to be considered true broadband.

Mweb and Webafrica communications head Greg Wright told MyBroadband that ISPs’ typical FTTB clients were hairdressers, dental practices, and real estate agencies.

“They tend to opt for download speeds between 20Mbps and 50Mbps,” Wright said.

The ISPs regard around 50Mbps to be the sweet spot for a small business.

“That said, restaurants and facilities which tend to attract more users should opt for at least 100Mbps,” Wright said.

The latter will have lots of people regularly converging on a particular business location, which may need to offer Wi-Fi access to make itself more attractive to customers.

RSAWeb told MyBroadand that small to medium businesses often used 10Mbps to 20 Mbps for light tasks, and 50Mbps to 100 Mbps for cloud tools and video conferencing.

“SMEs with five to 10 users typically need 50Mbps to 100 Mbps download speeds, while larger teams or high-demand applications benefit from 500 Mbps or more.”

“Larger enterprises typically require anything from 100Mbps to 1Gbps to support data-heavy operations and hybrid work environments,” the ISP added.

It broadly categorised

Another major ISP — Axxess — told MyBroadband that a basic 5Mbps to 10Mbps per user was sufficient for basic usage, while more moderate data-consuming apps could require up to 50Mbps per user.

Axxess defined the following three broad categories of speeds for different types of businesses, applications, and simultaneous users.

Options for businesses in residential areas

Axxess said businesses located in residential areas that don’t have access to FTTB can get an FTTH package with higher data speeds.

However, it was important to have redundancy for added reliability and availability, which are very important for the modern customer.

Backup connections can use other popular high-capacity broadband technologies like fixed-LTE or fixed-5G.

It is also important to remember that you will need faster and higher-capacity routers and access points to facilitate multiple connections than you would typically require at home.

A mesh network can work well for covering each inch of your office space with wireless connectivity.

However, a wired network may be preferred for minimal interference or those workstations that use the most bandwidth — like a system used by a video editor that needs to upload large files.