South Africa’s big uncapped 5G battle — with prices from R449

There are several fixed-5G packages available to South Africans looking for a fast and uncapped wireless Internet connection.

5G can be a capable alternative broadband technology for those homes or businesses that currently don’t have fibre coverage.

Depending on your particular network conditions, 5G speeds can go up to hundreds of megabits per second and achieve low latency in the single digits, similar to fibre.

That makes 5G suitable for various online activities — including high-quality video streaming and competitive multiplayer gaming.

5G coverage has also expanded rapidly in 2021 and 2022, making it more likely for many users to find a 5G product supported in their area.

Rain was the first mobile network to launch fixed-5G packages in South Africa, starting with a single product at R999 per month in September 2019.

Since then, it has added two more affordable iterations with speed caps of 30Mbps and 60Mbps, currently priced at R529 and R739, respectively.

The youngest South African mobile operator’s primary strength is its offerings’ flexibility.

Whereas most rivals only offer 5G packages on a 24 or 36-month contract, Rain’s are available on a month-to-month basis and come with a free-to-use router.

Cancelling a package does not incur any penalty and typically only sees the customer pay their last subscription at the end of the month in which they cancel.

Some competitors offer month-to-month packages, but this always requires the customer to have a compatible 5G router. These are expensive and sometimes difficult to find in South Africa.

In addition, Rain scrapped its fair usage policies (FUPs) on all packages, which means they have no speed or protocol-specific throttling other than the maximum speed specified by the product.

In contrast, MTN’s network limits speeds after consuming a certain amount of data to manage network resources on its uncapped fixed-5G products.

MTN was the second major mobile network to offer fixed-5G packages for homes, which it launched in December 2021.

These can be bought either directly from the mobile network or through various ISPs that sell packages with their own FUPs — including Afrihost, Axxess, and MTN’s own Supersonic.

Prices for these packages range from R449 to R1,459, depending on the maximum speeds and FUP thresholds.

The cheapest product is an Axxess 5G package with a very conservative FUP that limits speeds to 2Mbps after 300GB consumption.

However, before that is reached, customers can enjoy speeds up to 500Mbps.

MTN offers 24-month and 36-month contracts, and a month-to-month package with a 6-month minimum commitment before the router is paid off.

Telkom 5G routers during the mobile network’s 5G launch in November 2022.

Telkom is the latest player to enter the 5G space, having only launched its 5G network in November 2022.

It offers three types of packages — 50Mbps, 100Mbps, or “unlimited” — each available with an indoor or outdoor installation on 24- or 36-month contracts.

Like MTN’s packages, these come with FUPs that throttle speeds after a certain amount of consumption.

In general, Telkom’s packages are more expensive than Rain and Telkom’s, but it lets users keep their router after the contract is paid up.

Why Vodacom is missing

Vodacom previously advertised several home 5G packages as uncapped.

However, unlike the uncapped 5G products from all the other providers, these come with a hard cap that severs the connection after hitting a set threshold instead of throttling it down.

These hard caps are relatively high — 600GB and greater — and Vodacom argued that most subscribers would not be able to hit these thresholds in a month of regular usage.

The operator also recently informed existing uncapped 4G subscribers that it was going to introduce a hard cap limit on their packages, but still call its product “uncapped”.

Following media backlash about how it was using the term “uncapped” in its marketing, Vodacom backtracked and announced it would instead discontinue all its uncapped products and replace them with high-cap metered packages instead.

Existing contract subscribers will be given the opportunity to cancel or migrate without any penalty.

The table below compares all of the true uncapped fixed-5G packages in South Africa. Where contract-based packages are listed, the prices shown are for 24 months.

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