MyBroadband tested Afrihost’s new uncapped Air Mobile data service and didn’t trigger its throttling rules until after an APN outage.
Officially, the Afrihost Air Mobile uncapped package offers 100GB at full mobile speeds, then another 50GB limited to 8Mbps and 50GB limited to 4Mbps.
After this, the service is uncapped but limited to a maximum speed of 2Mbps.
As with Afrihost’s other mobile data services, its uncapped product runs on MTN’s network.
Getting it working was effortless as we already had an active MTN SIM and only had to change our APN settings to make everything work.
We did all our testing with the SIM in a ZTE MC801A Router, but we did confirm that it works equally well on a mobile phone.
We started by doing various speed tests and found that we could connect to either MTN’s 4G or 5G network.
We did not see any faster speeds on 5G compared to 4G, so we stuck with the latter for better coverage.
During off-peak times we regularly got speeds over 100Mbps — impressive for a mobile service.
The speeds did drop to around 60Mbps during peak hours in the late afternoons, but this is still perfectly usable.
Our initial tests gave us an average download speed of 76.40Mbps, an upload speed of 46.92Mbps and a latency of 22.83ms.
We could easily stream 4K content at 60 frames per second without buffering, even during peak hours.
All our downloads also worked at full speed, including peer-to-peer services, Steam, and Xbox games.
After all our testing, we decided to see how fast we could burn through our data cap to test the throttled speeds.
We set up a list of games to download from a Steam library and a bunch of titles from Xbox Game Pass, which would comfortably push over the 100GB mark.
To our surprise, our downloads were still running at full speeds the following day, even though we were well over 100GB.
We continued and regularly tested our speeds without any sign of it dropping.
By the third day since starting our tests, we had downloaded 0.99TB of data.
The average of all the tests we did during this time gave us a download speed of 82.45 Mbps, an upload speed of 36.72 Mbps and a latency of 33.22 ms.
As we got to 0.99TB, Afrihost had a mobile APN outage, and when our Internet came back, we were limited to 2Mbps.
All our services still worked as well as before, only significantly slower.
We now had a download speed of 1.96 Mbps, an upload speed of 2.03 Mbps and a latency of 36 ms.
We could now only stream YouTube at 720p 60fps or 1080p 30fps without significant buffering.
Downloads run at about 230KB/s, which was expected from a 2Mbps connection.
Overall, we were impressed with the service and would have been even if we were throttled to the listed speeds when we should have been.
We managed to consume an entire terabyte of data over only three days.
If you are throttled to the correct speeds, this should take more than 40 days.
The theoretical maximum you could consume when correctly throttled on this package is around 800GB.
The package is only R22 more than the standard 100GB package and solves any worries about your data cap.
If you happen to get lucky and only get throttled at a terabyte, that is a nice bonus.
The APN outage was unfortunate but was dealt with by Afrihost very quickly.
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