Good news for Telkom mobile data customers

MyBroadband testing has shown that some Telkom mobile data customers are being allowed on the Telkom 5G network, with real-world speed testing results.

We recently noticed the 5G connection icon pop up when we inserted a Telkom prepaid SIM in a Samsung Galaxy S22+ device at our office.

Until recently, the Telkom 5G network only supported fixed mobile connections and specific devices.

The 5G icon soon disappeared, and when trying to do speed tests, the network would jump between LTE-A and 5G, with throughput similar to what we usually get on a regular LTE-A connection.

During later testing, we could not reproduce this behaviour, and, for now, the Samsung remains firmly connected to the Telkom LTE-A network, even with different SIM cards.

We decided to perform more testing to get proper 5G speeds on a standard consumer SIM and device.

Our best results were with a Huawei Mate 40 Pro 5G, which consistently connected to 5G on multiple Telkom prepaid SIMs.

All mobile devices do not necessarily support all frequency bands, combinations, and configurations, so this may be part of the reason some devices work better than others.

Huawei is the sole network equipment vendor for Telkom in South Africa, so it is reasonable that their devices would be the first to be fully supported.

The Mate 40 Pro gave us consistent download speeds of over 400 Mbps on the MyBroadband Speedtest app at the Broad Media offices in Centurion. This was very close to the 5G speeds we see on MTN and Vodacom at the same location.

To give the Telkom network the best shot, we drove to the Telkom headquarters in Centurion and performed multiple tests at various points around the office park.

This seems to be the centre point of Centurion’s 5G coverage zone on the Telkom website, so it should offer some of the best speeds.

While the speeds achieved here were still on par with other 5G connections, we did not see any spectacular results and most of the tests delivered download performance between 300 and 400 Mbps.

It is great to see that the Telkom 5G network is open to the public, even though only some devices and SIM cards may be provisioned to use it.

The Telkom 5G coverage map does show spots of coverage in all the major cities in South Africa, so many Telkom customers with 5G-capable devices should be able to enjoy next-level Internet speeds soon.

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