MTN keeps its ‘best network’ crown

MTN has again been named South Africa’s best mobile network by Opensignal, winning or sharing 10 of the 16 awards in the analytics company’s latest report, though it now shares the reliability award with Cell C.

Opensignal’s November 2026 mobile network experience report, based on measurements from users’ devices between 1 July and 28 September, gives MTN four outright wins: consistent quality, download speed, upload speed and 5G availability. In Opensignal’s previous report, in August 2025, which used a slightly different set of categories, MTN won 11 of 15 awards, including all four overall experience awards.

MTN users averaged download speeds of 56.4Mbit/s, 14.4% faster than Vodacom’s 49.3Mbit/s and more than double Telkom’s 25.1Mbit/s. They also scored highest on consistent quality at 71.9%, ahead of Cell C’s 66.9%.

The result comes despite MTN cutting its South African network capital spending by 17.1% in the six months to June. Its lead is also narrower than the award count suggests. Cell C edges it on reliability, 904 points to 901, and on games and voice-app experience every operator except Rain is within about a point of the leader.

Vodacom swept the 5G speed and 5G coverage awards. Its users saw average 5G download speeds of 231.1Mbit/s, 58.2% faster than MTN’s 146.1Mbit/s, and 5G uploads of 26.1Mbit/s. But its users spend only 14.5% of their time connected to 5G, though that is nearly double the 7.6% in Opensignal’s August 2025 report, when MTN led on 12.4%. On overall download speed, Vodacom trails MTN. South Africans’ time on 5G remains low, as TechCentral reported in June.

Among users with 5G-capable devices, MTN leads on 5G availability, the share of time they are connected to 5G, at 56.5%, ahead of Vodacom’s 53.5%.

Rain: the most 5G, the weakest experience

Rain’s users were connected to 5G 49.4% of the time, more than three times as long as MTN’s users (15.1%), which Opensignal attributes to Rain’s 5G-centric network strategy.

That hasn’t translated into a better experience. Rain scored lowest of the five operators on reliability (842 points) and consistent quality (59.6%). On 5G consistent quality it managed 56.9%, against 80.8-82.6% for the other four. Its average 5G download speed of 103.2Mbit/s was level with Cell C’s and less than half of Vodacom’s.

Cell C and Telkom each won or shared four awards. Cell C shared reliability with MTN, and the two smaller operators shared 5G consistent quality with MTN and jointly led voice-app experience. Four operators tied on 5G reliability, with Telkom posting the highest score, 948 points. Telkom also shared time on network with MTN, its users having a signal 99.2% of the time.

Telkom was otherwise the slowest of the five, with average download speeds of 25.1Mbit/s and uploads of 4.7Mbit/s. Its 5G-capable users were on 5G only 14.7% of the time. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media