South Africa

MTN has been top of our South African 4G Availability leaderboard for a couple of years now, and the operator remains dominant with a winning score over 4 percentage points ahead of its rivals. But it was our users on Telkom's network who saw the most impressive boost in 4G Availability, as its score jumped by well over 8 percentage points. This leap has put Telkom into a three-way draw for second place with Cell C and Vodacom, who both saw their scores increase by at least 3 percentage points.

While MTN is the only operator to have passed 80% in national 4G Availability, the other three players are all less than 2 percentage points away from this milestone. Based on the current rate of improvement, we fully expect to see all four operators pass the 80% mark in our next report — which will provide testament to the rapid maturing of the South African mobile market. However, our recent global analysis showed the country wasn't the best in the continent when it came to 4G Availability.

MTN and Vodacom remain neck-and-neck in our Video Experience analysis, with both operators scoring 65 (out of 100). And the two rivals both saw their scores rise by around 3 points since our last report, meaning the two continue to share our Video Experience award. Cell C and Telkom remain in third and fourth place, but both saw larger increases — of 5 and 4 points respectively — to narrow the gap on the leaders.

The increase in MTN and Vodacom's Video Experience scores means the two operators are on the cusp of Very Good (65-75) ratings in this metric — with our users on their networks enjoying fast loading video times and almost non-existent stalling, even at higher resolutions. By comparison, Cell C's score earned it a Good rating (55-65), while Telkom remains in Fair (40-55) territory — meaning our users watching video on Telkom's network in particular will likely struggle with longer load times and frequent stuttering, even at lower resolutions.

In terms of 4G-only Video Experience, Cell C's score has increased enough to tip it over into a Very Good rating — we now have three operators achieving 4G network scores with a Very Good ranking. And as 4G Availability continues to increase, our overall Video Experience scores will continue to climb, making mobile video viewing more of a viable proposition across all networks. And in a country where fixed-line broadband connections are relatively rare and the large majority of South Africans only connect to the internet via cellular, this improvement has the potential to transform people's lives.

Looking at download speed, we are still seeing pretty clear evidence of two tiers of mobile network experience in South Africa. MTN and Vodacom remain tied for our Download Experience Award, with scores within a couple of megabits of the 20 Mbps mark. Meanwhile Cell C and Telkom remain in a distinct second tier, with scores at least 7 Mbps behind the leaders — although those scores are improving.

All of our users on all four of the national operators' networks saw increases of at least 1 Mbps in their Download Speed Experience. But in percentage terms, the second-tier players — Cell C and Telkom — both saw double-digit growth in their scores: 16% and 11% respectively. Looking at the longer term, it's MTN who has really worked to earn its shared prize in Download Speed Experience. In the 12 months since our report in September 2018, MTN's score has jumped over 21%, forcing a draw for our award and keeping the pressure on Vodacom.

While our users in South Africa are seeing healthy improvements in their download speeds, the same can't be said of the uplink side of their connections. Only one of the national operators saw any significant improvement in their Upload Speed Experience scores: the winner Vodacom, which saw its score increase just over 6%. The other three operators, Cell C, MTN and Telkom, statistically saw no movement in their scores since our last report.

The picture in upload gets worse when we isolate the operator's 4G networks. None of South Africa's national operators managed to improve their 4G Upload Speed scores — in fact two of them, MTN and Telkom, saw declines of around 10% in our measurements. This is a relatively common phenomenon we have observed in maturing markets, as operators tend to focus their network and spectrum assets on improving download speeds, sometimes at the expense of upload. But upload experience is becoming increasingly important as mobile user habits shift from passive internet consumption to user-generated content.

Some of the best improvements we saw in any of our metrics were in Latency Experience. Vodacom kept hold of our award, improving its score by some 5.7% over the past six months — but all the other three operators saw double-digit percentage growth in this metric. MTN came in second, putting pressure on the leader with an improvement of 15.2% — but even this jump wasn't the greatest we measured. Our users on Telkom's network saw their average Latency Experience score improve by 16.3% in the past six months, while Cell C's score was 14.7% better.

The gap in Latency Experience scores between South Africa's four national operators has shrunk to less than 13 milliseconds, down from nearly 19ms in our last report. We are still seeing evidence of the two tiers of mobile network experience among the operators in latency, but this rift seems to be narrowing.