Uncapped vs large capped 4G deals in South Africa — best bang for your buck

There are numerous capped 4G/LTE packages available in South Africa that provide more than enough data for the average household.

Three of the country’s major mobile network operators — MTN, Telkom, and Rain — now offer uncapped 4G packages.

However, most of these products come with fairly stringent throttling policies which limit download and upload speeds after a customer consumes a certain amount of data.

That is not the case with capped 4G packages, where operators offer the maximum possible speed their networks are capable of, but limited usage.

We compared the prices of high-data-allocation 4G packages in South Africa with those of uncapped LTE products to see if they are a good deal.

For the capped packages, we used 10GB as the minimum amount of data needed daily.

That would be enough for streaming Netflix in high definition for about three hours per day while leaving another gigabyte or so to spare for other online activities.

At 10GB consumption per day, subscribers would typically require at least 300GB of data every month.

Additional night-time data offered with many capped LTE packages can be used for downloading updates and other large files overnight, but was not considered as part of the allocation to identify eligible packages.

We found nine products with more than 300GB of data per month from Afrihost, Axxess, MTN, Telkom, and Vodacom.

In Vodacom’s case, we included its so-called “uncapped” Home Internet LTE packages in our comparison.

Unlike their names suggest, these packages are not truly uncapped, as they get hard-locked when users reach a certain amount of consumption.

While the company told MyBroadband it would retract these products over two weeks ago, we found they were still being advertised on its website at the time of publication.

Therefore, these packages were listed among the big-cap LTE products in the table below.

Upon assessing the capped packages above, we found they generally offer low value compared to uncapped 4G packages.

To illustrate the point, you can look at the example of the 400GB capped MTN package on Afrihost and Axxess for R749 per month.

For R250 less per month, you can get uncapped on the same network with no speed throttling by default, with a free-to-use router included, if you opt for Supersonic’s Fixed-LTE Lite product.

At the higher end, Axxess offers an uncapped data package on MTN’s network that only gets throttled down from its maximum speed of 150Mbps after 1TB of consumption at R779 per month.

The MyMTN Home Capped 4G package with 1TB data costs R70 more than this product, with the same maximum speed and a hard cap.

To get away with a cheaper 1TB plan, you would have to sign up for a 24-month or 36-month contract on Vodacom, which will get you a Home LTE plan that starts throttled at 30Mbps.

The uncapped route, therefore, seems to be the best option in the case of MTN.

If Vodacom or Telkom have the best and most reliable signal in your area, their capped packages are still good value for money.

The table below shows the uncapped 4G packages available on MTN, Telkom, and Rain’s networks in South Africa.

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