Fibre shake-up in South Africa — Cheapest 500Mbps and 1Gbps connections

Numerous fibre network operators (FNOs) offer South Africans fast and affordable 500Mbps or 1Gbps fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections.

These top-end speeds let users download and upload large files in the shortest time possible on a relatively broadly-available Internet connection in South Africa.

They also boast enough bandwidth to easily support multiple members of a household gaming, working, and streaming high-quality video simultaneously.

On a 500Mbps connection, users get a theoretical download speed of 62.5MB/s.

Provided you don’t use the Internet connection for other applications at that time, downloading a 100GB game will take less than 27 minutes.

On a 1Gbps connection, doing the same will take just over 13 minutes.

We compared the prices FNOs charge for 500Mbps and 1Gbps packages to get a comprehensive view on the state of high-end FTTH pricing in South Africa.

For our analysis, we used all the networks with packages available through one of South Africa’s most well-known Internet service providers (ISPs) — Afrihost.

It is important to emphasise that prices will vary between ISPs.

Our choice of Afrihost was based on its generally solid reputation for offering high-quality service and customer support.

Afrihost also supports a staggering variety of FNOs and was the only prominent provider that had updated all the FTTH pricing on its website following a wave of recent changes by network operators.

We found that 14 FNOs offered packages with download speeds of 500Mbps through Afrihost.

The lowest price for a 500Mbps uncapped service was available on four networks — Clear Access, MetroFibre, Vumatel, and Zoom Fibre — at R1,197 per month.

However, Clear Access and MetroFibre’s packages had symmetrical speeds, so these offered the best overall value.

The average price across all 14 packages was R1,376.

The table below compares the prices of all the 500Mbps packages available from Afrihost’s partner FNOs.

Regarding the thirteen 1Gbps packages available from Afrihost, MetroFibre claimed the sole position as the cheapest provider.

At R1,297 per month, it was R200 cheaper than the second most-affordable providers.

TT Connect was the most expensive provider, charging R2,247 per month for its symmetrical package.

However, one particularly costly package we did not include in this list was Vumatel’s 1,000/500Mbps product.

At R2,347, it was actually the most expensive of all the packages available on Afrihost’s website.

However, Vumatel offers a much more affordable 1Gbps package for R1,497, which comes with an upload speed of 250Mbps, whereas TT Connect’s symmetric 1Gbps is its sole option.

Mitsol and Link Layer had the cheapest symmetric 1Gbps packages at R1,547 per month, with Frogfoot hot on their heels at R1,577.

The table below compares the 1Gbps FTTH packages available from all the FNOs available through Afrihost.

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