Most affordable fibre Internet with speeds under 50Mbps — From R275 per month

There are many affordable fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) packages with speeds under 50Mbps that are more than sufficient for most South African households’ online demands.

In the past few years, fibre network operators (FNOs) have increased their entry-level package speeds.

In many cases, they forced customers to upgrade to faster speed with a higher price.

While this has frequently resulted in products offering far better value for money on price per Mbps of speed, many of these customers did not necessarily need the boost.

A 20Mbps or 30Mbps package can easily support multiple simultaneous 4K or full HD video streams, which is among the most common household uses of uncapped Internet products.

MyBroadband perused the FTTH catalogues of seven major Internet service providers (ISPs) offering lines from the biggest FNOs to find the most affordable options with speeds under 50Mbps.

As of April 2025, three of the nine biggest FNOs in South Africa did not offer any such packages on their primary networks.

Herotel’s slowest package boasts symmetric 50Mbps speeds, while Frogfoot’s entry-level product features a 60Mbps download speed and 30Mbps upload speed.

However, Frogfoot’s specialised low-income product — Frogfoot Air — does have 10Mbps, 25Mbps, and 30Mbps options.

Zoom Fibre currently offers symmetric 15Mbps, 20Mbps, and 30Mbps lines, but these will be discontinued from June 2025.

Its new entry-level offering boasts symmetric 50Mbps speeds and will be far more expensive than its previous entry-level offerings.

Vumatel, Octotel, Openserve, MetroFibre, Evotel, and Vodacom still offer packages with speeds under 50Mbps on their networks for middle to higher income households.

However, Octotel’s 25Mbps product and Openserve’s 30Mbps line are exclusive to new installs, which means users cannot downgrade from a faster package.

Across these six networks, we found entry-level FTTH packages with download speeds from 10Mbps to 45Mbps.

The most affordable option was a symmetric 10Mbps product from Webafrica on Vuma Reach, priced at R275 per month.

While our fibre pricing analyses may sometimes exclude products limited to lower-income areas, there would be little justification for leaving out Vuma Reach.

Reach’s network covers more households than Vuma Core, the FNO’s product for middle to higher income households.

The table below provides a summary of the sub-50Mbps FTTH products available from major ISPs on the country’s six biggest FNOs.