Which fibre network is actually best value?

The finding: the biggest network isn’t the best value

Octotel tops the table at R0.56 per Mbps (at 5 Gbps), while Openserve — the largest fibre network in South Africa by homes passed — manages R1.55, roughly 2.8× worse per unit of speed.

What makes that more interesting is that Openserve is not expensive at the entry level — it carries one of the cheapest starting packages in the whole dataset at R307. Its weakness is at the top: value per megabit stays flat as you climb, where the better-value networks drop sharply. If you only want a basic line, reach matters more than this table. If you want speed, the network in your street materially changes what you pay for it.

An important caveat about per-megabit scoring

Rand-per-megabit rewards networks that sell fast tiers and punishes ones that don’t — which can be misleading rather than informative. A network selling only entry-level products will look terrible on this measure while being perfectly good value for what it is. That’s why the fastest tier column is in the table: read the two together.

Vuma Reach is the clearest example. It sits near the bottom on per-megabit, but it’s explicitly a low-cost, lower-speed product aimed at affordability — one of the cheapest entry prices in the dataset. Judging it on gigabit efficiency measures it against something it never set out to be.

Two-thirds of South African fibre is symmetrical

A finding that surprised us. Of the 730 packages we track with both speeds published, 480 (66%) are fully symmetrical — upload equals download. The common assumption that home upload is always a small fraction of download is simply wrong here.

This matters if you upload for a living — video, backups, streaming out, or working from home on a VPN. Symmetry is a genuine advantage of fibre over fixed wireless, where upload is typically a fraction of download, and it’s worth checking before you assume a cheaper wireless product is equivalent. Our fibre or 5G tool covers that trade-off.

Methodology & limitations

• Computed at build time from the same per-ISP catalogue scrapes that power our comparison pages — see the pricing index for the full method and collection dates.
• Uncapped residential fibre only. A network appears once at least one tracked ISP sells a priced package on it, so networks carried by fewer ISPs rest on smaller samples — the ISP count is in the table.
• Value is not availability. The best-value network in the country is irrelevant if it isn’t in your street. Fibre is built street by street, so check your address before drawing any conclusion about what you can buy.
• Value is not quality. These are prices. Peak-hour performance and support differ between ISPs on the identical network — we rank providers separately by aggregated review score.
• Advertised monthly prices, excluding installation and activation. Promotions rotate constantly.

The CSV is free to use with attribution and a link to this page. Need a different cut? Ask us — we’ll tell you honestly whether the dataset supports it.