What South African fibre actually costs.

What the data shows

Cheap speed is expensive. The clearest pattern in the dataset is that the price of a megabit collapses as you buy more of them. At 25 Mbps the median package works out to R21.96 per Mbps; at 1 Gbps the median is R1.55 — roughly 14× better value per unit of speed. Entry-level fibre is the worst value on the market by this measure, which is worth knowing if you’re choosing a package on monthly cost alone.

The counter-intuitive one: the cheapest 1 Gbps package we track (R775, RSAWEB on cybersmart) costs less than the cheapest 500 Mbps package (R889) — and less than the median 100 Mbps package (R939). Pricing is set per-product by each ISP, not derived from a per-megabit formula, so the ladder isn’t always monotonic. If you assume faster always costs more, you can pay more for less.

The same speed varies enormously. Look at the spread column: at every tier the dearest package costs multiples of the cheapest for an identical line speed. Some of that is genuine difference — support quality, international capacity at peak, contract terms — but a large part is simply margin. It is the single strongest argument for comparing ISPs on the specific network that reaches your address rather than accepting the first quote.

Methodology

• Source. Prices are scraped from each ISP’s own public catalogue by the same pipeline that powers our comparison pages. No figure on this page is hand-entered, so the report cannot drift from what the site shows.
• Scope. Uncapped residential fibre only. Business, capped, LTE and 5G products are excluded.
• Tier matching is exact. A package counts toward the 100 Mbps tier only if its advertised download is exactly 100 Mbps. We don’t bucket nearby speeds to inflate sample sizes, which is why 405 of 730 tracked packages appear here — the rest sit on intermediate tiers like 45, 65 or 240 Mbps.
• Prices are advertised monthly recurring cost at the time of collection, excluding once-off installation and activation fees, router purchases and promotional discounts. Those can move the real first-year cost substantially — see what fibre installation costs.
• Median vs average. Both are given. The median is the more robust figure for a like-for-like sense of a tier, since a handful of premium products pull the mean upward.

Limitations — read these before citing

• Not the whole market. 8 ISPs, not every provider in South Africa. It is a substantial sample, not a census, and cheapest-in-our-data is not necessarily cheapest available anywhere.
• Collection dates differ per ISP. Every provider’s date is shown in the table above. The oldest catalogue in this run is from 7 July 2026 while the newest is 1 September 2026, so figures involving the older data may lag a price change.
• Price is not availability. A cheap package is irrelevant if the network doesn’t reach your home. Fibre is built street by street — always check your address before drawing conclusions about what you can buy.
• Promotions come and go. South African fibre pricing is heavily promotional. A snapshot catches whatever was running that week.
• No quality adjustment. These are prices, not value judgements. Two identically priced packages can differ sharply on support and peak-hour performance — we rank providers separately by aggregated review score.

Using this data

A companion report slices the same catalogue by network rather than speed tier, which turns up a different finding: the largest network in the country is roughly three times worse value per megabit than the best.

The CSV above is free to use with attribution to FibreScout and a link to this page. If you need a cut we don’t publish — a specific network, province, or a longer time series — get in touch and we’ll see what the dataset supports.

We’re keeping this as a living index rather than dated quarterly snapshots until the collection cadence is reliable enough to promise one; a page that claims to be quarterly and isn’t is worse than one that doesn’t claim it.