Affordable uncapped Internet for homes without fibre at 50Mbps

You don’t necessarily have a fibre network available in your area as there are several uncapped wireless Internet packages on the market with at least 50Mbps download speeds for South African households.

As much as fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity has proliferated in the past few years, a lot of households in the country still don’t have access to fibre and have to use other services for their main home connection. Before fibre arrived, the primary form of fixed-access connectivity in South Africa was Telkom’s digital subscriber line (ADSL) services.

At the current moment, Telkom is in the process of shutting down the copper networks that support DSL and replacing them with fibre or wireless alternatives. DSL connections peaked at around a million in 2016, and the country’s biggest fibre networks already have over 1.5 million customers between them.

Not having a fibre network in your area often means that you will have to consider wireless broadband technologies. Fortunately, there are a lot of products that are able to achieve at least 50Mbps download speeds, which is sufficient for the average household’s needs.

Fixed 5G wireless network connection is the closest thing that you can get to fibre in terms of performance. Companies such as Afrihost, Axxess, MTN, Rain, Supersonic, and Telkom sell uncapped fixed 5G packages, which includes with download speeds of around 50Mbps or 60Mbps. Most likely to be the next best thing if you don’t have 5G coverage is fixed LTE. Uncapped LTE packages with 50Mbps or higher speeds are available from several ISPs.

Apart from being slower than 5G, uncapped 4G/LTE packages generally offer less value, as they come with more stringent fair usage policies (FUPs). Service providers use FUPs to make sure that their networks aren’t overwhelmed by bulk downloads and other activities that monopolise network resources. If cellular network connectivity is unavailable or unreliable in your area (due to load-shedding, for example), your next best option might be fixed-wireless access (FWA) using unlicensed spectrum.