Load-shedding crushes data speeds in South Africa’s top mobile broadband neighbourhoods

Analytico’s latest research shows that Bryanston, Century City and Garsfontein had the fastest mobile Internet in South Africa at the start of 2023. The results are based on 267,853 tests done on the MyBroadband Speedtest app since 1 January 2023. MyBroadband’s speed test servers are hosted in Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centres, guaranteeing a neutral testing environment for consumers to test their connections. Through NAPAfrica, network operators have a free 10Gbps connection to MyBroadband’s speed test platform at its peering points. These tests consist of in-house drive tests all over the country, as well as crowd-sourced data from app users. Interestingly, no area had an average download speed of over 100 Mbps, which was commonplace in previous tests. This may be attributed to the effect of load-shedding on mobile networks. Bryanston achieved an average of 93 Mbps, and the second place, Century City, averaged below 80 Mbps. Upload averages have also taken a hit, and only Bryanston averaged above 20 Mbps, which the entire field used to beat.