Uncapped wireless and mobile battle in South Africa

Many South African households living in areas without fibre-to-the-home connectivity can get uncapped wireless data products starting from well under R500.

There are four main types of wireless uncapped broadband technologies in South Africa — fixed-LTE, fixed-5G, fixed Wi-Fi or Wireless ISPs (Wisps), and satellite.

Most populated parts of the country will have access to one or several of the first three technologies, whereas satellite is only usually considered in deep rural areas as it is expensive and slower than the others.

From a customer’s perspective, the big benefit of Wisps over fixed-LTE and fixed-5G are their less stringent fair usage policies (FUPs).

Wireless Access Providers Association (Wapa) spokesperson Paul Colmer recently told MyBroadband that mobile networks were using “smoke and mirror” marketing.

He accused the operators of using “very loose” interpretation of terms like uncapped and unlimited to drive sales.

Alternative fixed wireless access (FWA) products generally have much less stringent FUPs because they operate in unlicenced Wi-Fi spectrum bands.

The downside is that FWA must contend with interference from other devices that use this spectrum, including smart security devices.

FWA equipment is capable of advanced noise reduction, intelligently transmitting data packets using methods like beam-forming to work around this.

However, that hardware can be very expensive, requiring that users pay a big upfront fee for a month-to-month FWA package or sign up for a long-term contract.

Examples of FWA include Supersonic’s Air Fibre, which uses the Tarana Wireless G1 platform.

For this system, households must pay a once-off R1,999 installation fee for the Air Fibre antenna.

Another major wireless Internet service provider is Hero Wireless, which sells its antennas starting at R1,000.

Fixed-LTE and fixed-5G rely on licenced mobile spectrum, which, although in short supply, is exclusive to the operator in question.

These packages only require a router, which can be sometimes be free-to-use. Major providers like Afrihost and Axxess also sell compatible routers at a discount.

These are often more affordable than specialised FWA antennas and routers.

Strengths of each technology

MyBroadband compared the prices and speeds of fixed-LTE, fixed-5G, and alternative FWA products in South Africa.

Satellite was excluded from this particular comparison as it is generally the worst option in terms of cost and performance outside of areas where it is the only choice.

Although satellites have more bandwidth than 4G, 5G, and other terrestrial FWA services, they are much further from the end-user, which severely limits performance.

Although Starlink has somewhat changed this with low-Earth orbit satellites, the service is still technically considered “illegal” by South Africa’s official communications regulator and requires some wrangling to use locally.

The recent increase in Starlink Roaming costs has also pushed the service’s prices up swell over R1,500 in South Africa, making it significantly more expensive than other wireless services.

Of the three remaining technologies we focused on, uncapped fixed-LTE tended to be the most affordable, with prices starting from R299 for three different offers running on Vodacom, MTN, and Telkom’s networks.

Fixed-5G boasted the best speeds, with even the most affordable Axxess Vodacom Standard 5G package capable of reaching a speed of 500Mbps.

Alternative FWA technologies’ primary advantage was dedicated bandwidth, including specified upload speeds.

Uncapped mobile data providers generally do not advertise their upload speeds, although these can be greater than FWA’s uploads. However, they are typically a fraction of their download speeds.

The most affordable alternative FWA service was a Supersonic 5/1Mbps Air Fibre package priced at R449.

It should be noted that there are several other FWA options on the Rush Network with similar pricing.

However, some of these have stringent FUPs, eliminating the main benefit of choosing FWA over mobile products.

The table below compares the prices of uncapped wireless products in South Africa.

It should be noted that there are many more options in the market, but we focused on major providers Axxess, Herotel, Rain, and Supersonic.