South Africa’s elite hub dominating mobile network speeds

Suburbs in the affluent Sandton area in Johannesburg make up half the top 10 neighbourhoods with the best mobile network speeds in the country.

That is according to a recent analysis by MyBroadband Insights, relying on the results of 303,513 tests conducted on the MyBroadband Speed Test mobile app in the first quarter of 2025.

South Africa’s average mobile network speeds have improved drastically in recent years thanks to substantial infrastructure investments by networks Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, and Rain.

The introduction and expansion of the latest-generation of cellular connectivity — 5G — has played a major role in this growth.

In the last quarter of 2019, the average download speed recorded on MTN and Vodacom’s networks were 40.64Mbps and 32.23Mbps, respectively.

Five years later, both operators had just about doubled those speeds, while the three smaller players of Telkom, Cell C, and Rain had also seen substantial improvements.

Mobile network speeds are also outperforming fixed Internet speeds in South Africa.

However, this should be seen within the context of the different capacity provisioning strategies for typical mobile and fixed Internet products in South Africa.

Many people using cellular connectivity get best-effort speeds on capped products, whereas fixed Internet products like fibre-to-the-home tend to limit speed rather than consumption.

In the first three months of 2025, Morningside in Sandton had the highest average mobile download and upload speeds of any neighbourhood in South Africa.

Established in March 1950 on the part of an old Witwatersrand farm called Zandfontein, the suburb is believed to be named after another with the same name in southern Edinburgh in Scotland.

Morningside is a mixed commercial-residential area and includes various small and medium businesses, schools, hotels, shopping centres, and clinics.

MyBroadband Speed Testers measured an average download speed of 190.22Mbps and average uploads of 33.49Mbps in Morningside during Q1 2025.

However, network latency was the worst in the top 10 neighbours, at an average of 29.95ms.

In a distant second place in terms of download speed was the largely residential Garsfontein in Pretoria East.

Mobile network speed tests in that suburb recorded average download speeds of 159.82Mbps and upload speeds of 26.62Mbps.

It was the only neighbourhood in the top 10 for mobile network speeds that also featured in the top 10 for fixed Internet speeds.

Three more Sandton suburbs — Bryanston, Sandown, and Woodmead — made up the rest of the top five.

Sandown was the top performer in the previous analysis of mobile speed test results in Q4 2024, while the other two suburbs also featured in the top 10 in that comparison.

The first area outside Gauteng in the ranking — Cape Town’s city centre — had the sixth-highest mobile data speed.

It was followed by another Sandton suburb — Sunninghill — in seventh place.

Sandton-adjacent Rosebank placed eighth, while Matroosfontein in Cape Town and Fairland in Randburg ranked ninth and tenth, respectively.

Overall, the average mobile network speeds in the top 10 fastest neighbourhoods declined slightly from the last quarter in 2024.

This may be due to several factors — including people returning to the business-heavy areas after a holiday at the coast in December, increasing network demand and lowering achievable speeds.

The table below summarises the top 10 neighbourhoods with the fastest mobile network speeds in South Africa in Q1 2025.