Most affordable 100Mbps home Internet in South Africa — From R449 per month

There are a range of broadband technologies capable of providing households with uncapped data at speeds of 100Mbps or more.

Fibre connectivity is often the preferred form of home broadband connection due to its high speeds, low latency, relaxed fair usage policies (FUPs), and overall reliability.

In more recent times, it has also become more sought-after due to often being able to remain online throughout many hours of load-shedding.

This is a weak point for LTE and 5G services, which rely on mobile network towers that can often go down when their batteries run flat or generator fuel runs out.

However, although fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity has expanded rapidly in the past few years, many households still don’t have access to this service.

Fortunately, Vodacom, MTN, and Telkom have invested significantly to increase uptime on their most congested towers during load-shedding, which has made mobile broadband options more attractive.

We looked at uncapped broadband packages selling for less than R1,000 per month and found 31 options.

These used various connectivity technologies — including FTTH, fixed-LTE, fixed-5G, and fixed-wireless.

For the FTTH option, there were numerous more packages on the market, but we focused on plans available from four major ISPs on the four biggest fibre networks in the country.

The most affordable FTTH package with at least a 100Mbps speed was available from Webafrica on Frogfoot’s network and cost R699 per month. It provides download speeds of 120Mbps and uploads of 60Mbps.

The second cheapest product was also available from Webafrica on Openserve’s network. Priced at R709 per month, it supports download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 50Mbps.

The most affordable option overall was the Axxess Standard 5G package running on MTN’s network, which is priced at R449 per month.

It supports speeds going up to an impressive 500Mbps, but this is dependent on network coverage, hardware, and congestion.

It also comes with a FUP that throttles speeds to 2Mbps after the first 300GB of consumption and requires that the user buy a supported router, whereas FTTH packages typically come with free-to-use routers.

If you don’t have access to either FTTH or fixed-5G, then an Axxess uncapped fixed-LTE package with 100Mbps speeds will set you back at least R549 per month, not including the cost of the router.

The table below summarises the details of more than 30 uncapped broadband packages that support speeds of 100Mbps or more