Thursday, February 13, 2025

A Quick Look At SA’s Most Affordable Fibre Network

Given the rising cost of just about everything these days, we're all looking at ways to save a little wherever possible, including home fibre.

[imagesource:here]

Jirre, hey.

How about the price of petrol these days? We have now ticked past the R21 a litre mark and diesel is not too far behind.

Remember to tip your Uber drivers because their meagre margins are being further eroded by this, too.

Given the rising cost of just about everything these days, we’re all looking at ways to save a little wherever possible, including home fibre.

I will caveat that by saying as long as there is no compromise on reliability. Load shedding is one thing, but when the WiFi drops things can really go full Lord of the Flies.

To help you make an informed decision, MyBroadband has done the hard yards and compared fibre package prices on five of South Africa’s major Fibre Network Operators (FNOs). Those are Frogfoot, MetroFibre, Octotel, Openserve, and Vumatel:

To get our pricing data, we looked at three different Internet service providers (ISPs), namely Afrihost, Cool Ideas, and RSAWEB…

RSAWeb’s Openserve packages are generally the cheapest among the FNOs compared. However, all Openserve packages (except the 50 Mbps service) generally only have half the upload speed compared to download speeds.

For R40 per month more, RSAWeb’s 100 Mbps Octotel service offers double the upload capacity.

There’s really not much wrong with 50Mbps, which can usually handle two or three simultaneous video streams and some extra online activity.

But far be it from me to tell you how quick your home fibre should be.

Here’s MyBroadband’s analysis of RSAWEB’s fibre-to-the-home prices. The green numbers indicate the cheapest price for that download speed:

Image: MyBroadband

You can see the Afrihost and Cool Ideas tables here.

Of course, which FNO you can choose depends on which are available in your area. You can search using your address here and then see if there are any specials running.

Both Octotel and Openserve are running deals at present via RSAWEB. Here are the former’s deals:

Nice to knock a few hundred off that cost for the first few months.

Does anybody know where I can score similar petrol discounts? Asking for a friend.

[source:mybroadband]