Here it is – Rain Mobile’s true network performance

Rain launched its first mobile services in South Africa on 6 June, offering consumers one plan with mobile data priced at R50 per GB.

Data-hungry consumers can also add unlimited off-peak data for R250 per month, which is valid for 19 hours a day, except at peak times – 18:00 to 23:00.

Rain said its 4G network and mobile data packages, with no contracts and data that never expires, will redefine how South Africans use mobile data.

“We are the only mobile network that focuses solely on data offerings, thereby significantly reducing the price for consumers to connect to the Internet,” said Rain.

Rain network taking strain

Rain signed up thousands of customers within weeks, many of whom downloaded as much data as they could during their free data trials.

It was not long before Rain’s network started to take strain, and in July Rain announced it would suspend the sale of its fixed-LTE products due to capacity constraints.

Rain CEO Willem Roos said the popularity of its fixed and mobile products meant it was rapidly “utilising the currently-available capacity on our network”.

“To ensure a continued great experience for all our customers, we have decided to suspend new sales of the fixed-wireless offering for the present time,” said Roos.

Many Rain subscribers also started to report poor speeds and streaming problems, especially during peak times.

Rain admitted that certain areas experienced capacity constraints, but it was addressing these problems.

True network performance tested

Over the last few months there have been mixed reports on Rain’s network – many subscribers are very happy with the service, while other complain about poor speeds.

To establish how Rain’s network really performs, MyBroadband performed over 40,000 download, upload, and latency tests across South Africa over the last three months.

The tests were performed with a range of different LTE devices, ranging from affordable smartphones to Samsung Galaxy S9 phones.

A custom version of the MyBroadband Android Speed Test App was used for the tests, with the test servers hosted at NAPAfrica in Teraco’s vendor neutral data centres.

Instead of taking the average performance, which can skew the results, MyBroadband conducted cell down sampling.

This means that the average performance on each cell (2,898 in total) is calculated first, and the average of these cells is then calculated.

The map below shows where Rain tests were performed in South Africa’s major cities.

Each red dot indicates a single speed test. The dots get bigger when multiple tests are performed in close proximity.

Average performance in South Africa

The speed tests results – based on 40,959 speed tests on 2,898 cells – show that the average download speed on Rain’s network is 22.49Mbps.

The average upload speed is 10.30Mbps, while the average latency to servers in Cape Town and Johannesburg is 37ms.

The table below provides an overview of the performance of Rain’s network in South Africa.

Average speed per neighbourhood

The table below provides the average performance of Rain’s network in neighbourhoods where MyBroadband conducted a high number of tests.

Now read: Rain unlimited off-peak data for R250 here to stay

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