(Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)
  • A large survey of 185,000 tests across South Africa shows that Vodacom offers the fastest 4G speeds.
  • Telkom is a laggard, with Vodacom's offering 50% faster.
  • MTN came in a close second.

A new survey shows that Telkom offers the slowest 4G service in the country. Vodacom - the country’s fastest network – is 50% faster.

The results are based on over 185,000 tests across 55,000 unique 4G devices across South Africa, for the period between April and June 2018.

The tests were conducted by US firm Ookla, the company behind the popular global internet testing site Speedtest.

See also: Vodacom went to court to be allowed to reach shareholders via SMS, because the Post Office was on strike

Vodacom received a 4G speed score of 30.28, followed by MTN (28.58), Cell C (21.68) and Telkom (19.88).

In a separate study by the local IT firm ATIO, Vodacom was also named the country's fastest network in the second quarter of this year. ATIO studied 100,000 cellphone downloads for its survey. 

Vodacom’s Chief Technology Officer Andries Delport said the group spent over R48.59 billion the last six years to achieve the results.

“Vodacom was the first African mobile network to exceed 80% population coverage on 4G and these performance results show that we provide the widest coverage at the best speeds,” Delport said in a statement.

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