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Midrand, Sandton record SA’s fastest internet speeds

Johannesburg - South Africa’s fastest internet download speeds for November 2014 have been recorded in two fast-growing urban areas in Gauteng: Midrand and Sandton.

This is according to Ookla’s Net Index which captures download and upload speed data via its popular Speedtest.net application and website. The speed test service notches up five million tests per day, while Ookla also says that it has 350 million users and 3 203 testing servers worldwide.

The data is only recorded from users who use the application and website, and therefore does not accurately represent overall download speeds that are experienced across the country.

But the data does provide a comparison of how various cities and towns across the globe compare with each other regarding broadband.

In South Africa, speed test results for Midrand during the month of November 2014 indicated that the area has the country’s fastest average recorded mobile broadband download speed of 22.15Mbps.

South Africa’s financial hub Sandton took top position for November with its recorded fixed line broadband average speed of 30.27Mbps.

Cape Town recorded average mobile broadband download speeds during November of 12.41Mbps while the city's fixed line speeds were 6.59Mbps for the period. Durban scored an average speed test result of 5.18Mbps for fixed line broadband downloads but data for its mobile speeds are not available for November from Ookla.

During January 2014, South Africa recorded an overall average mobile broadband download speed of 6Mbps but that has increased to 9.65Mbps in November, meaning the country now ranks 50 out of 111 nations. Meanwhile, South Africa’s fixed line broadband speeds have increased from 4.28Mbps in January to 6.39Mbps in November with the country ranking 131 out of 195 nations, according to the Ookla data.

CEO of research firm Strategy Worx, Steven Ambrose, said that while speed tests are conducted by the likes of ‘techies’ and the data is “skewed” because of this, he explained that it does reflect certain developments regarding South Africa’s growing download speeds.

Ambrose said that there are two trends spurring on mobile broadband speeds in South Africa.

“One, 3G penetration in South Africa is good and pretty solid across all the networks for a large chunk of the country,” Ambrose told Fin24.

"The other thing in the last quarter that's definitely pushing those figures up is the solid emergence of LTE across many of the networks, especially from Vodacom, MTN and, most especially, Telkom, even though they fare quite badly on average,” Ambrose said, referring to more LTE offerings from the likes of Telkom.


The above areas recorded SA's fastest mobile broadband speeds for November 2014. (Ookla)

Regarding South Africa’s fixed line download speeds, Ambrose said fibre links are increasingly being adopted by small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and large corporations thanks to price decreases.

"You can now get a solid fibre broadband line for R3000 to R4000 per month,” Ambrose told Fin24.

"Last year this time it was R30 000 to R100 000 per month for that,” he added.

Ambrose also said that "a lot of the speed tests are probably coming from the techies in those places”.

Far behind global peers

Despite South Africa’s increasing internet speeds, the country ranks low compared to other nations in terms of Ookla’s November 2014 data.

Over the last 30 days, Singapore has topped Ookla’s recorded fixed line broadband with an average download speed of 103.19Mbps, Hong Kong follows with 95.76Mbps, Romania third with 62.07Mbps, Sweden fourth with 52.09Mbps and Lithuania fifth with 46.37Mbps.


South Africa's average fixed line broadband speed. (Ookla)


* Follow @GarethvanZyl on Twitter. For more tech news, follow Fin24tech @Fin24_Tech.

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