Best South African fibre ISPs for online gamers in 2025

Cybersmart and Clear Access are the best ISPs for South Africans who want low ping when gaming online.

This is according to MyBroadband Insights data, which found that during the first quarter of 2025, Cybersmart and Clear Access stood out for having latencies under 10 milliseconds (ms).

Latency is a main driver of online gaming performance since it measures the amount of time it takes for data to travel from your computer to a remote server, and back.

Therefore, better latency results in less delay and more responsive gameplay overall. Even a fraction of a second can be the difference between a win and a loss.

It is even more important than fast download speeds, which have a minimal impact on gaming performance and are more important for downloading new games or updates faster.

The MyBroadband Speed Test is powered by 10Gbps servers at the vendor-neutral Teraco data centres in South Africa.

While the tested latencies to the MyBroadband servers may not reflect the complete latency users will experience to all gaming servers, many games host servers in these same data centres.

This means the average latency to the MyBroadband servers should be a good indicator of latency performance for most games.

With this in mind, when determining the best ISPs for online gaming, MyBroadband Insights focused on the average latencies of South Africa’s top ISPs.

This data was collected from 793,772 speed tests conducted using the MyBroadband Speed Test app during Q1 2025.

The MyBroadband Speed Test app allows users from across South Africa to test their Internet speeds and determine whether their ISP meets their expectations.

The app tests Internet connections across both fixed and mobile connections and is available to download on Android and iOS devices. You can also perform a speed test through your browser here.

When a user runs a test, the app determines the user’s download speed, upload speed, and latency. Users can also rate their Internet quality on a five-star scale once the test is complete.

MyBroadband Insights used this data to determine which ISP delivered the best latencies in Q1 2025, which is valuable to gamers.

To qualify for the list, an ISP needed to have at least 800 speed tests conducted on its network during this period.

The results

The data showed that only two fibre ISPs delivered sub-10ms average latencies – Cybersmart and Clear Access.

RocketNet took the third position with 10.69ms ping on average, while household names like Cool Ideas, RSAWEB, Afrihost, MWEB, Vox, and Supersonic were all in the top 20, offering average latencies below 30ms.

At least two ISPs in the top 20 rankings are gaming-focused ISPs — Clear Access and UrbanX (listed as parent company FirstNet Technology).

This is no accident. It’s the result of carefully managed infrastructure, peering choices, partnerships with major gaming companies, and often a willingness to cater to a niche — one that’s rapidly growing in South Africa.

It is also important to note that many ISPs don’t cover large geographic areas, or cover areas with concentrated populations.

This could, in many instances, allow such ISPs to benefit from shorter internal network paths and better control over routing, with their customers reaping the benefits of better ping.

The table below shows the average latency rankings of South African ISPs for Q1 2025.