MTN has once again secured the title of South Africa’s best mobile network in the MyBroadband Insights quarterly ‘Mobile Network Quality’ report.
The 2019 second-quarter report ranks South Africa’s mobile networks on a network quality score. Based on 330,596 speed tests performed by 11 004 MyBroadband Android Speed Test App users across South Africa between April 1 and June 30, MTN achieved a network quality score of 9.78.
This is a slight contraction on the preceding two quarters’ network quality score of ten, being the highest value obtainable when comparing the relative performance of networks, with the score calculated for each network considering download speed, upload speed and latency.
The telecommunications giant had secured a ranking of ten in the fourth quarter of 2018, based on 383,479 speed tests conducted between October 1 and December 31, 2018, and a ranking of ten in the first quarter of this year, based on 345 700 speed tests between January 1 and March 31.
Meanwhile, Vodacom achieved a score of 8.24 in the second quarter of this year, sliding quarter-on-quarter from its first-quarter score of 8.33.
Rain scored 6.09, Telkom 6.16, and Cell C 5.35 during the second quarter, compared with the preceding quarter’s scores of 7.01, 6.26 and 5.89 respectively.
“There has been a significant increase in network performance from MTN, Vodacom and Telkom in 2019,” says MyBroadband Insights director Marius Hollenbach.
The research shows that South Africa had an average mobile download speed of 25.67 Mb/s, up from 24.20 Mb/s in the previous quarter, he explained.
MTN had the highest average download speed for the quarter under review at 35.9 Mb/s, followed by Vodacom with 29.76 Mb/s, Telkom with 23.07 Mb/s, Rain with 17.91 Mb/s and Cell C with 17.32 Mb/s.
This compared with the prior quarter’s average download speed of 26.95 Mb/s for MTN and 26.78 Mb/s for Vodacom, while Rain registered speeds of 21.67 Mb/s, Telkom 19.83 Mb/s and Cell C 15.56 Mb/s.
There are reports that Rain service provider is the only operator which saw a slump in performance during the second quarter of 2019, which is likely a result of more users joining the network.
MIKE OCHONMA
