Major Telkom network improvements in Cape Town

Telkom has invested heavily in improving its network around the Cape Town CBD area in 2024, and new research shows that these improvements have been hugely successful.

MyBroadband Insights compared the MyBroadband Speedtest platform data for Cape Town from Q1 to Q3 and found major speed improvements.

Upload and download speeds both improved 8% from Q1 to Q2, with latency remaining at the same level across both months.

Q3 showed an even bigger improvement of 33% for download speeds, while upload speeds rose by another 8%.

Overall, download speeds in the Cape Town area have improved from 28Mbps to 40Mbps in two quarters, while upload speeds have increased to more than 12Mbps on average.

This was achieved without a notable increase in latency, which remained at about 40ms.

A huge amount of data was collected to support this research.

MyBroadband’s Speed Test servers are hosted at Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centres to ensure a carrier-agnostic testing environment.

The MyBroadband Insights team performs quarterly drive tests to cover all the major cities and roads in South Africa, ensuring a strong base of comparable data.

Consumers can add to this data by conducting tests using the MyBroadband Speedtest app, ensuring the MyBroadband Speed Test results reflect the real-world user experience.

This creates an accurate and trustworthy image of the actual data speeds and coverage across South Africa, while allowing for easy comparison when operators deploy changes to network infrastructure.

The table below shows the average speeds achieved by Telkom users in Cape Town in the first three quarters of 2024.

The power of Massive MIMO

Much of Telkom’s improvement in the Cape Town area is powered by the implementation of Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (Massive MIMO) through its partnership with Huawei.

Massive MIMO is an innovative technology that helps each tower communicate with more devices without noticeable speed degradation.

This is done by forming smaller beams to each device, reducing the interference between different devices connected to the same tower.

Massive MIMO also supports the ability to share spectrum between LTE and 5G networks based on demand.

This has been particularly beneficial for Telkom within its multi-functional 2,300MHz band, where Massive MIMO is currently used to optimise 60Mhz of spectrum capacity.

As a result, Telkom boasts a faster and more stable network across both its LTE and 5G products.