2021 MyBroadband Awards — South Africa’s best broadband providers announced

MTN, Cool Ideas, and Vumatel have been crowned as South Africa’s top broadband providers in the 2021 MyBroadband Awards.

These awards recognise excellence in South Africa’s broadband and telecommunications industry, and are based on real-world tests and user feedback — making them particularly coveted.

MyBroadband Award winners must outperform their competitors on objective measures such as customer satisfaction and network quality.

The 2021 MyBroadband Awards comprised three categories: Best Mobile Network, Best Fibre Provider, and Best Internet Service Provider.

These categories were all extremely competitive, but each ultimately had a clear winner.

These winners are listed below.

Best Mobile Network — MTN

MTN once again outperformed its rivals to be named the Best Mobile Network for 2021.

It won this category comfortably thanks to its average download speed of 64.23Mbps during 2021, compared to Vodacom and Telkom’s average download speeds of 35.05Mbps and 27.23Mbps respectively.

MTN’s exceptional performance can be attributed to the fact that it has significantly outspent its rivals on infrastructure investment over the past five years.

Best Fibre Provider — Vumatel

South Africa boasts a highly competitive fibre network provider industry that includes Openserve, Frogfoot, Octotel, Liquid Telecom, Vodacom, and MTN.

However, Vumatel’s aggressive expansion in 2021 helped it defeat these competitors and win the MyBroadband Award for the Best Fibre Provider.

Vumatel has deployed over 31,000 kilometres of fibre infrastructure across South Africa and now passes 1.2 million homes.

Best Internet Service Provider — Cool Ideas

Cool Ideas has beaten many excellent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) — including Afrihost, RSAWEB, Vox, Supersonic, and MTN — to be named the Best ISP in South Africa for 2021.

The industry-leading ISP built upon its excellent 2020 performance to again top the MyBroadband ISP rankings for the majority of 2021.

This was thanks to its impressive network quality and superior customer satisfaction scores.