Downloading a movie in South Africa — 2015 vs 2025

In the past decade, the download speeds of fixed home broadband in South Africa have improved drastically, while the cost for each megabit-per-second (Mbps) of speed has also plummeted.

The change shows the powerful impact that healthy competition can have on empowering consumers with better-value products.

State-owned company Telkom had a legislated monopoly on fixed copper-based Internet services in South Africa from the late 1990s up to 2012.

The company became infamous for failing to provide a proper service and neglecting its customers, who had little choice but to use Telkom’s DSL connectivity.

Its behaviour drew the ire of many third-party Internet service providers (ISPs) and consumers and culminated in the Competition Tribunal ordering Telkom to split its wholesale and retail businesses in 2012.

Telkom could nonetheless have maintained its lead in fixed infrastructure, but it failed to timeously embrace a new emerging technology — optic fibre.

For some companies, having to deal with Telkom’s infrastructure issues — even on fairer terms than in the past — remained an issue.

While Telkom itself was a headache, the copper technology it used was also susceptible to theft and power outages, exacerbating DSL Internet outages.

In 2014, Vumatel — an upstart at the time — proved there was demand for faster and more reliable fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband in a limited rollout in Parkhurst.

Critically, it also showed that rollouts were financially feasible with an adequate level of interest measured in community surveys.

While Vumatel’s rollout over the next few years would be the most aggressive, many more companies — including Frogfoot, MetroFibre, Herotel, and Octotel — jumped into the fibre “land grab.”

Over time, FTTH rollouts and services became cheaper due to greater economies of scale, enabling expansions beyond the most affluent areas into middle-income and lower-income areas.

As of 2023, roughly 10.4 million households had access to at least one fibre network operator (FNO) in their area.

Just 36,000 DSL customers remained by the end of 2024.

That is a dramatic decline from the peak of one million customers in 2015 and 2016, when DSL was the most popular fixed Internet product.

In 2015, an uncapped entry-level DSL product with 2Mbps download speeds cost between R528 and R586 from major Internet service providers (ISPs).

In early 2025, several ISPs offer entry-level fibre packages within that price range, with speeds ranging from 20Mbps to 50Mbps.

Where Afrihost previously sold a 2/1Mbps DSL line on Openserve for R586, it now offers a 25/25Mbps line on Vumatel for R497 per month or a 50/25Mbps line on Openserve for R647.

At the top-end, the fastest DSL connection available in 2015 was a 40/20Mbps line, which cost between R1,752 and R2,587.

These days, those speeds are near the entry-level or mid-tier offerings of several FNOs.

In 2025, you could subscribe to a 1,000Mbps (1Gbps) package from nearly all major FNOs for less than what a 40Mbps DSL package cost a decade ago.

Add the fact that Telkom was regularly criticised for its DSL products not achieving their advertised speeds while fibre generally offers more reliable and consistent performance, and the difference in experience becomes even greater.

MyBroadband analysed how long it would take to download movies, music, and games of varying sizes on entry-level, mid-tier, and top-end DSL connections in 2015.

We compared those findings with how long 2025 FTTH products with comparable pricing would take.

The tables below provide a full breakdown of the times it would take to download various types of files using similarly priced DSL and FTTH packages in 2015 and 2025, respectively.

Entry-level

• 2/1Mbps DSL package: Afrihost on Openserve — R586 per month
• 25/25Mbps FTTH package: Afrihost on Vumatel — R489 per month

Mid-tier

• 10/2Mbps DSL package: Afrihost on Openserve — R1,086 per month
• 100/100Mbps FTTH package: Afrihost on Vumatel — R987 per month

Top-end

• 40/10Mbps DSL package: Afrihost on Openserve — R1,936 per month
• 1,000/250Mbps FTTH package: Afrihost on Vumatel — R1,497 per month