Specialists leave mobile operators behind on home internet

Vox has taken every fixed broadband award in Opensignal’s latest South African benchmarking exercise, an outcome that puts a specialist internet service provider ahead of the country’s largest mobile operators on home connectivity.

The comparison measured the performance of Herotel, Vodacom, Rain, MTN, Telkom and Vox across connections spanning fibre and fixed wireless access – a category that bundles fibre to the home, 5G fixed-wireless and legacy wireless into a single “fixed broadband” ranking, despite meaningful product-level differences between them.

It is also a narrow field. South Africa has more than 200 internet service providers, and Opensignal declined to disclose the sample size behind the report. Asked why only these six operators were included, Mohamed Abbas, principal analyst at Opensignal, said: “It’s always a judgment call when deciding which operators to include in a national overview. Our focus for this report is familiar retail brands with a mix of national presence and significant market share.”

Opensignal builds its rankings from crowd-sourced data drawn from the real-world activity of anonymous research participants as they use mobile and broadband networks.

The report, covering the first quarter of 2026, awarded Vox top scores for download speed, upload speed, consistent quality, video experience and reliability experience. Rain placed second on three of those metrics, with Herotel taking second on consistent quality. Vodacom – the country’s largest mobile operator – finished third on consistent quality and download speed but sat in the bottom half for video experience and reliability experience.

Structural advantages

Vox’s lead is narrowest on download speed, where its 24.9Mbit/s edged out Rain’s 23.9Mbit/s. That winning figure is itself worth pausing over: entry-level Frogfoot and Vumatel packages now start at 25Mbit/s, and many households are on 100Mbit/s-plus lines. A leading score below 25Mbit/s suggests Opensignal’s sample is weighted to lower-end packages, or that the methodology is capturing application throughput rather than line capacity. Either way, the numbers are not directly comparable to advertised line speeds.

Upload speed tells a clearer story. Vox’s 17.5Mbit/s is 6.4Mbit/s ahead of second-placed Vodacom at 11.1Mbit/s, and more than double the scores of Rain (7.8Mbit/s) and MTN (7.7Mbit/s). For households with creator, cloud backup and hybrid work workloads, that asymmetry matters.

Read: Vodacom, MTN and Telkom battle over network supremacy

The more telling result is on reliability experience, where Opensignal measures whether a household can actually stay connected across multiple devices and tasks. Vox scored 363 on a 100 to 1 000 scale, followed by Rain (332) and Herotel (330). Vodacom (246), MTN (228) and Telkom (220) formed a cluster more than 80 points behind. On a metric designed to capture real-world multi-device usability, the specialists and the fixed-wireless pure-play are pulling away from the mobile operators’ retail broadband offers.

Telkom’s bottom-of-table 16.2Mbit/s on download speed and 220 score on reliability experience is the most awkward data point in the report. Its Openserve wholesale division exceeded 1.5 million homes passed in Telkom’s third quarter of its 2026 financial year, with 786 490 homes connected – an industry-leading 52.4% connectivity rate. Telkom also reported 6.6% growth in fibre subscribers and 11.6% growth in fibre revenue in the first quarter. The retail experience, on Opensignal’s numbers, is not keeping pace with the network footprint.

Vox’s structural advantages are worth noting. Vox and Frogfoot – one of South Africa’s larger open-access fibre network operators – are sister companies under Vivica Group. That alignment between network layer and ISP layer is rare locally, where most ISPs resell capacity on Vumatel, Openserve or Octotel.

In February, Vox was also accredited as a Google peering provider – a designation that strengthens direct interconnection with Google services and is likely to help on metrics such as video experience, where YouTube weighs heavily. Vox topped that category with 66.1 points.

The results of the survey come as South Africa’s fixed broadband market is expanding faster than it has in years. Communications regulator Icasa reported in its recent State of the ICT Sector of South Africa Report for 2025 (PDF) that fixed broadband subscriptions grew 19.3% year on year to 3.26 million in 2025, with fibre-to-the-home and fibre-to-the-building subscriptions up 22% to 3.01 million.

Fixed wireless access – the technology underpinning Rain’s second-place ranking – grew 39% to 1.26 million subscriptions. Statistics South Africa’s General Household Survey for 2024, using a different definition, put the share of households with internet access at home at just 17.4%, a reminder that subscriber growth is running well ahead of national penetration.

Irony

There is an irony buried in the rankings. Vodacom’s effective 30% stake in Maziv, which took effect on 1 December 2025, gives it indirect exposure to Herotel, which Vumatel acquired last year.

Vodacom’s own retail fixed brand sits in the bottom half of the rankings, but through Maziv it is now a shareholder in one of Opensignal’s top three reliability category finishers.

Read: Global network rankings put just one SA operator on the map

MTN – the only one of the big three without a major stake in a fibre operator – finished last or second-last on four of the five metrics. Its converged home business grew 30% year on year to 344 000 subscribers by the third quarter of 2025, but on Opensignal’s data, that scale is not yet translating into an experience lead.  – (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media