5Gbps home fibre launched in the US — how pricing compares to 1Gbps in South Africa

US Internet service provider (ISP) Frontier has launched a symmetrical 5Gbps fibre package to all customers with access to its network in the US.

The company claims to be the first to roll out such a fast home fibre product nationally.

5Gbps fibre is also available from the country’s biggest telecoms company by revenue — AT&T — but this is limited to only certain areas in its fibre footprint.

A 5-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) connection can theoretically offer download speeds up to 625 megabytes per second (MB/s), assuming the customer’s equipment supports it.

Frontier listed some of the impressively-short times it would take users to download various files at this rate, including:

• 1.6 seconds to download Adobe Photoshop on PC (1GB)
• Less than 36 seconds to download a House of the Dragon episode in 4K (22 GB)
• Less than 2 minutes to download a 100-minute 8K movie (67 GB)

For gamers, many of the latest AAA titles over 100GB in size should theoretically also take less than 5 minutes to download.

The package is priced at $154.99 per month (R2,702, excl. VAT), with initial installation and a router included.

At that price, customers will be paying roughly $0.03 per megabit of speed, roughly R0.54.

US vs South Africa

We did a basic comparison between Frontier’s package and fibre products in South Africa to get an idea of the relative cost.

While Vumatel has been testing a 10Gbps package for several years, the fastest fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) packages in South Africa boast a 1Gbps download speed.

These are available on several major fibre networks — including Frogfoot, MetroFibre, Octotel, and Vumatel — and feature various upload speeds.

Frogfoot is one of the few operators that offer the package with a symmetrical 1Gbps upload speed, priced at R1,547 when bought through major ISP Afrihost.

That package works out to roughly R1.55 per megabit, around three times the price of Frontier’s package.

Looked at from another perspective, the price difference of R1,155 gets you an additional 4Gbps of speed, priced at R288.75 per gigabit per month.

The table below compares the prices of Frontier’s 5Gbps package in the US with Afrihost’s 1Gbps fibre prices in South Africa.

We have also included Frontier’s 2Gbps and 1Gbps packages to see how they stack up.

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Now read: Pay Vumatel for 50Mbps, get 0.1Mbps