South Africa has the second-fastest average mobile download speed in Africa at 19.2Mbit/s — beaten on the continent only by Morocco, which has an average of 23.57Mbit/s.
When it comes to best mobile coverage, however, South Africa slips to fifth place – behind Mauritius, Comoros, Seychelles and Egypt.
These are the findings of a new report from SpeedChecker, which collects data from end-user devices running both Android and iOS. The company has found that MTN is the fastest mobile network operator in South Africa, while Vodacom offers better coverage.
Read: Ranked: South Africa’s fastest mobile operators and ISPs
The company explains that measurements are “executed towards a content delivery network (CDN) that has a large geographical footprint and hosts a significant part of the content that is being accessed by the users”.
“This ensures our results are a good approximation of the user’s actual quality of experience. All measurements must contain accurate location information using GPS or Wi-Fi geolocation methods,” it said.
“Measurements are considered only from apps that been approved by SpeedChecker. Submitted measurements are checked to see if they are within expected ranges and additional security precautions are implemented to ensure measurement data is not being manipulated,” the company explained.
The fastest countries for mobile downloads after Morocco and South Africa are Tunisia, Mali and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Malawi. Botswana is sixth, followed by Namibia, Madagascar, Liberia and Mauritius.
Of the 46 countries analysed for speed by SpeedChecker, the Central African Republic scored stone last at 3.97Mbit/s. Mauritania and Libya didn’t perform much better, coming in second and third last respectively.
More information about the results and test methodology is available here (PDF). – © 2022 NewsCentral Media
