Best South African neighbourhoods for fast mobile Internet

Analytico‘s latest mobile speed test report revealed that suburbs in Centurion, Midrand, and Sandton have the highest mobile network download speeds in South Africa.

The firm used 285,839 speed tests from MyBroadband’s mobile speed test apps and website to determine the top ten neighbourhoods that enjoyed the country’s best mobile network speeds in the first quarter of 2024.

The first noteworthy finding was that seven of the top areas, including the entire top five, were in Gauteng. In addition, download speeds have improved significantly from a year ago.

During that period, mobile networks were struggling with downtime and other connectivity issues due to severe load-shedding that strained the performance of their cellular towers.

The intensity of the power cuts was significantly less for the first few months of this year, while mobile networks have also expanded their backup power installations to improve uptime during load-shedding.

In the latest assessment, all of the top 10 suburbs had average download speeds of well over 100Mbps. In early 2023, none of them had speeds in the triple digits.

Hennopspark in Centurion ranked first, setting itself apart from the pack with the best average download speed of 155.18Mbps and best average upload speed of 36.12Mbps.

The neighbourhood with the second-fastest download speed — Lyttelton Manor — is also located in Centurion, about 3km from Hennopspark’s.

Users in this area recorded the second-best average download speed of 144.40Mbps and second-best upload speed of 34.08Mbps.

The third-best average speeds were measured in the Midrand suburb of Noordwyk, which clocked an average 144.40Mbps download speed and 27.80Mbps upload speed.

Eldoraigne in Centurion and Fourways in Sandton completed the top, with download speeds of 143.39Mbps and 139.72Mbps, respectively.

The first suburb in the top 10 outside Gauteng was the upmarket Umhlanga Ridge in KwaZulu-Natal, which placed sixth with a download speed of 139.10Mbps.

The only other non-Gauteng neighbourhoods in the ranking were Durbanville, a middle-class neighbourhood in Cape Town’s northern suburbs and Mount Edgecombe Country Estate in KwaZulu-Natal.

A final interesting finding from the top 10 was that all the suburbs had low average latencies ranging from around 20ms to 30ms, except 10th-placed Halfway Gardens, with its average ping of 62.10ms.

The table below shows the top 10 fastest neighbourhoods for mobile network speeds in the first quarter of 2024, as calculated by Analytico.