Fibre for less than R500 — from 4Mbps to 50Mbps

South Africans looking for an affordable fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) package will find a wide range of products to choose from for less than R500 per month.

The prices of fibre packages are not primarily determined by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who resell them at a margin.

It is the fibre network operators that install the infrastructure that determine the largest cost of the package.

With surging demand and significant increases in data traffic exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, many fibre network operators (FNOs) bumped up line speeds and slashed wholesale prices on most of their lines in 2020 and 2021.

That allowed many ISPs to follow suit by reducing prices charged to the end-user.

Openserve got the ball rolling in February 2021 and forced the hand of many of its competitors, who had to adapt or risk losing customers if they didn’t remain competitive.

The bad news is that, more often than not, there is only one FNO available in your area.

That means that if they have chosen not to bring down their prices as significantly as some of the major operators, you could be out of luck.

Fortunately, the ISPs that resell packages compete heavily for customers, which helps drive down prices.

We compiled a wide selection of FTTH packages available for less than R500 from major ISPs in the country.

All the packages we considered included a free-to-use router and installation costs, and most, except one from Telkom, are available on a month-to-month basis.

Note that a cancellation fee might apply for certain month-to-month products if you cancel or migrate within a set period, as stipulated in the agreement (usually 12 months).

For example, several ISPs charge installation and trenching costs if you cancel within a year, which effectively makes their deals one-year contracts.

At the time of publication, several ISPs were running special promotions with discounts on the first few months of fibre packages.

To avoid confusion, we chose not to include these in our comparison as they would not be reflective of the actual cost over a longer period.

The packages in the table below are sorted from slowest to highest download speed, with the lowest price in each download speed category shown in bold.

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