Introduction
A quick glance at our awards table shows that MTN and Vodacom are still the two main players in South Africa’s mobile experience landscape, while Telkom and Cell C haven’t made an appearance in the table, yet.
In this report MTN won four awards — Video Experience, Download Speed Experience, 4G Availability and now also Upload Speed Experience — and drew another two with Vodacom — Games Experience and Voice App Experience. Vodacom, on the other hand, kept hold of our 4G Coverage Experience award.
However, in the past six months we observed a mixed bag of trends compared to what we reported in March 2020, as our users on all networks saw their average experience increase in a number of metrics, and decrease in some others. These results show that despite the challenges of COVID-19 in 2020, the mobile network experience in South Africa has been mostly resilient.
While in March 2020 we saw the four operators improve across all metrics, except for Cell C in 4G Availability, this time we recorded some setbacks. For example, our Vodacom and Telkom users saw their average Download Speed Experience decline by 18.8% and 15.6% respectively, compared to six months ago. On the other hand, our Cell C users now on average have a Very Poor (60-66) Voice App Experience, which is one step down from the Poor score (66-74) they saw in March. MTN was not entirely immune to the situation, and also saw limited declines in Video Experience and Voice App Experience.