Telkom the leading mobile voice network in Johannesburg

MyBroadband Insights’ recent voice network quality testing has revealed that Telkom has the leading voice network in Johannesburg.

The testing assessed the performance of the four major South African mobile voice networks — Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, and Cell C.

These tests were done in partnership with Keysight distributor Coral-I and used Nemo — Keysight’s world-leading testing platform.

Testing was conducted from 15 May to 4 July 2024 and comprised over 633 total call hours across South Africa’s major cities, secondary cities, smaller towns, and major roads.

The setup for the testing included an originating station and a terminating station, each with four Android devices running custom firmware.

The terminating station was in a location that had good signal quality for each network and a backup power supply to avoid any disruptions.

All results were then collated according to the globally recognised European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) specifications.

In our Johannesburg voice network testing, Telkom had the highest overall voice network quality score, closely followed by Vodacom and MTN.

Telkom’s biggest area of advantage was its Speech Quality MOS score, which was the best of all networks at an impressive 4.26/5.

Both Telkom and Vodacom achieved a perfect Call Setup Success Ratio, while Telkom, Vodacom and MTN all had the lowest Dropped Call Ratio of only 0.63%.

Testing also found that Vodacom had the fastest Call Setup Time of only 1.08 seconds.

The table below summarises the voice network test results for Johannesburg.

Voice network testing — Johannesburg

Network Operator	Call Setup Time	Call Setup Success Ratio	Dropped Call Ratio	Speech Quality MOS	Overall score
Telkom	2.34s	100%	0.63%	4.26	91.6
Vodacom	1.08s	100%	0.63%	3.95	89.3
MTN	1.69s	99.37%	0.63%	4.03	86.8
Cell C	9.75s	98.95%	1.69%	4.17	64.6