Huawei equipment offers the fastest 5G speeds in South Africa

Huawei’s radio equipment boasts the fastest download speeds of all vendors on the three 5G mobile networks in South Africa.

That is according to data from over 95,000 speed tests performed on the MyBroadband Speed Test Android app in the past six months.

Vodacom, MTN, and Telkom use Huawei’s equipment on some of their 5G towers.

Rain also uses Huawei equipment for its fixed 5G network.

Speed tests in the past six months showed that Vodacom’s Huawei equipment had the best average download speed in South Africa — 268.20 Mbps.

Nokia’s hardware also performed great on the Vodacom network, with the second-fastest average speed overall.

Huawei was the best-performing vendor on the MTN network, squeezing out a little more performance than Ericsson. ZTE’s equipment performed worst overall in terms of average download speeds, with 193.78Mbps.

MTN faced challenges with load-shedding over the past year, but substantial battery backup and power resilience upgrades have allowed it to reclaim its position as a leading player in the 5G market.

Telkom’s 5G network, a recent entrant to the market, relies exclusively on Huawei equipment.

Impressively, this network boasts an average 5G download speed surpassing 200 Mbps, placing Telkom in a position to potentially become a frontrunner in the 5G market if it can keep up this performance.

The table below compares the speeds of 5G network equipment vendors in South Africa.

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