New Rain 5G deals crush Vodacom and MTN’s offers

Rain’s uncapped 5G data packages offer significant savings over similar packages from MTN and Vodacom.

Rain recently released an affordable, uncapped 5G data plan that offers speeds of up to 25Mbps for home use at R499 per month.

The mobile network operator was the first in the country to release a commercial 5G service back in 2019, which was initially only available in Gauteng.

Rain has since expanded its 5G service to include smaller towns, with plans to cover 5,000 new households with 5G each day until the end of 2021.

In spite of the issues faced with the lack of radio frequency spectrum in South Africa, several networks are offering unlimited 4G and 5G packages, with Rain launching its 5G Premium package in late 2019.

The Rain Home 5G Premium package offers uncapped speeds and data for R999 per month, with the company introducing its new, more-affordable Rain Home 5G Basic package this week.

Vodacom and MTN introduced their own commercial 5G services in 2020 after industry regulator Icasa assigned temporary spectrum to help networks cope with the demand for data during the Covid-19 lockdown.

MTN offers an unlimited 5G data package, with speeds of up to 500Mbps, that is subject to a 400GB fair use cap. Vodacom’s 5G services are all capped.

Other service providers, such as Supersonic and Afrihost, also offer uncapped fixed wireless access packages.

Supersonic offers an uncapped fixed-LTE package that is not subject to a fair usage policy, meaning customers can expect speeds up to 150Mbps without any throttling, depending on network quality.

Afrihost also offers a fixed-LTE package boasting speeds up to 150Mbps. The package is subject to a 1TB usage cap, after which speeds will be reduced to 1Mbps.

Both of these packages run on the MTN network.

Earlier this year, Supersonic introduced their Unlimited AirFibre network that uses an unlicensed frequency spectrum in the 5GHz band to deliver uncapped and stable broadband to areas where fibre infrastructure is not available.

Unfortunately, the rollout of Supersonic’s AirFibre network has been delayed by the global chip shortage.

Lastly, Telkom has offered an uncapped mobile data service for a while that is only available on a two-year contract and is subject to limitations.

Current uncapped fixed wireless access offers are summarised in the table below.

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