From R967 for 3GB to R399 for unlimited data

While consumer goods prices have increased and service quality has deteriorated in some sectors in South Africa over the past decade, one thing is undoubtedly more affordable and better: broadband internet.

The proliferation of reliable broadband connectivity can be attributed to three key factors: a more competitive market, significant technological advancements, and increasing Internet demand.

South African households first experienced home Internet connectivity with dial-up, which gained traction locally from around 1997.

Dial-up used public switched telephone network infrastructure and supported speeds of up to 56 kbps (0.056 Mbps), roughly 0.11% of the 50 Mbps for entry-level fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) products today.

Another telephone-based technology was ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), which offered speeds of 64kbps or 128kbps by using digital instead of analogue communication.

Telkom launched digital subscriber line (DSL) connectivity in South Africa in August 2002, offering speeds of 512Kbps and a price of R967 for 3GB of data.

While this was initially met with great optimism, the DSL era was marked with widespread frustration from users and the Internet service provider industry over Telkom’s fixed infrastructure monopoly.

While the DSL access fee of R680 had just about halved by 2009, the cost of two other compulsory components, installation and analogue line rental, had increased by more than R250.

The lack of competition in the fixed-line market meant that Telkom was under no pressure to price its products competitively or to improve service quality.

Mweb shook up the industry by launching affordable uncapped ADSL in 2010. However, it was still at the mercy of Telkom’s infrastructure and its preferential treatment of its own retail business.

Things started taking a turn for the better when the Competition Tribunal ordered Telkom to split its wholesale infrastructure and retail businesses in 2013.

One goal of this separation was to ensure that Telkom’s infrastructure division would treat its own and third-party Internet service providers (ISPs).

Although this enabled intensified competition at the ISP level, a true pricing upset would require more companies to be involved in fixed infrastructure.

A key development on this front was when a little-known fibre network operator (FNO) rolled out FTTH in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, in October 2014.

That ambitious newcomer was Vumatel, which went on to become South Africa’s largest fixed residential Internet infrastructure provider in the years that followed.

Entry-level uncapped packages started at R399 for a 4Mbps line and increased to R6,599 per month for an uncapped 100Mbps line. The uncapped 50Mbps package initially cost R3,298 from Cool Ideas.

However, the latter had dropped to R1,998 by the next month, as more ISPs started reselling the service. That included Cybersmart, which charged just R1,299 for the same product.

Uncapped fibre was not only cheaper than uncapped DSL but far more stable and reliable, with a particularly strong advantage in South Africa.

The copper cabling supporting DSL was increasingly targeted by thieves, sometimes leaving users without connectivity for many days.

The Vumatel project proved that South Africa was hungry for high-speed broadband and effectively launched a fibre land grab among many operators.

The FNOs initially targeted affluent areas before expanding into middle-class suburbs and are now increasingly focused on lower-income suburbs.

In 2025, you can get an uncapped FTTH package with 50Mbps speeds on Vumatel’s network for around R500 to R700 on all major fibre networks and from a wide range of ISPs.

For the R3,647 that Telkom’s 40Mbps DSL cost at launch in 2013, you could pay for at least two 1Gbps lines on most of the biggest networks.

The table below provides several examples of home Internet package prices to illustrate how much better off South Africans are today compared to the turn of the century.