Rain LTE-A tested – 30Mbps with low latency
Rain recently launched LTE-A commercial services, with several Internet service providers offering its product.
Internet Solutions is Rain’s go-to-market partner for its initial wave of products, with ISPs promising LTE-A speeds of between 10Mbps-50Mbps and offering a range of data caps.
Several providers, including the likes of Afrihost and Webafrica, have launched new promotional deals for their Rain products – offering double monthly data allocations until November 2018.
The package options and their pricing is detailed below.
| Rain LTE-A Packages | ||
|---|---|---|
| Package | Data | Price |
| LTE-A 55GB | 110GB (55GB+55GB) | R549 |
| LTE-A 85GB | 170GB (85GB+85GB) | R799 |
| LTE-A 120GB | 240GB (120GB+120GB) | R999 |
| LTE-A 220GB | 440GB (220GB+220GB) | R1,349 |
| LTE-A 330GB | 660GB (330GB+330GB) | R1,599 |
Rain tested
Rain kindly provided MyBroadband with a Huawei B618 router, which is supplied with Rain packages, and an LTE-A SIM to test its network.
Speed tests conducted in Randburg and Centurion yielded downloads of between 25Mbps and 42Mbps, with pings between 15 and 25 milliseconds to the MyBroadband Speed Test’s Johannesburg server. Upload speeds varied from around 8Mbps to 20Mbps.
Where we tested in Centurion, file download speeds from local and international locations were in line with the speed test results.
Netflix and YouTube also streamed without a hitch. Videos came down in Full HD without any buffering, and in YouTube’s case, a 4-minute 1080p video was in the buffer before the first minute had streamed.
Latency to international locations was also good – and we consistently saw pings of between 200ms and 280ms in Diablo 3 during tests.
The Rain router was also set up in the MyBroadband office for a week, where it was used by staff with no complaints.
It should be noted that all the tests were conducted over 802.11ac Wi-Fi using the Huawei B618.
Rain RttH
Rain brands its service as RttH – Rain-to-the-Home.
Huawei B618 router
The Huawei router is a dual-band unit (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and can connect up to 64 devices.
Speed test results
Latency was very low to local servers, and regularly dipped below the 20ms mark. Download speeds topped the 40Mbps mark in certain tests.
Steam and Battle.net tested
Game downloads and playing online worked well, with Steam file downloads reaching 3MB/s (24Mbps) in our test.
Thank you to Rain for providing us with a router and SIM for the tests.
Now read: Everything you need to know about Rain’s new LTE-A packages
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