How much do South African mobile service providers spend on their networks

When it comes to network investment, Vodacom has surpassed South Africa’s other main mobile providers in the last year.

MyBroadband compared the capital invested on networks by MTN, Vodacom, Cell C, and Telkom in the previous year.

The mobile network provider paid R11.1 billion on network expansion and maintenance, compared to R9.1 billion spent by the runner-up, MTN.

Telkom comes in third place with R2.8 billion in capital expenditure.

However, Telkom’s network investment remains significant in comparison to Cell C’s. Cell C’s network cost fell from R2.3 billion to R195 million per year.

This is due to the mobile operator’s goal to better its financial situation.

Cell C’s approach shifted from competing with MTN and Vodacom on network spend to working with them.

The mobile operator has entered into deals with the top two to use their network infrastructure.

Cell C has hired MTN to develop and run radio access network infrastructure on its behalf, in addition to roaming or network sharing arrangements.

This permits Cell C to continue utilising its spectrum assets rather than relying entirely on the cellular network capacity of Vodacom and MTN.

Through this method, Cell C reduced their network spending from billions to millions of dollars every year.

It also offers Cell C users better network coverage without the mobile operator needing to spend billions of dollars to construct and maintain a network.

Cell C CEO Douglas Cragie Stevenson stated that the cell operator has given up on competing with Vodacom and MTN due to the impossibility of competing with their network investments.

The graph below compares the capital spent on networks by South Africa’s mobile providers over the last year.

The network expenditure of South Africa’s mobile carriers over the last year is likely to have included major investments in backup power solutions.

Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said in May 2022 that the company spends over a billion rand per year on batteries.

Although the objective is to keep the whole network operational during power outages, Joosub stated that guaranteeing that all 15,000 of their towers have adequate backup batteries would be costly.

MTN’s corporate affairs head, Jacqui O’Sullivan, stated in September 2022 that the mobile company has spent “billions on batteries” for its network towers.

“It’s tough, we’re managing to keep our mobile network stable, but that’s also because we’ve spent billions on batteries,” she said.

Vodacom and MTN compete for South Africa’s greatest mobile network, with the latter coming out on top in 2022 despite investing less on its network.

According to MyBroadband Insights’ annual Mobile Network Quality Report for 2022, MTN has South Africa’s top mobile network.

MTN outperformed the competition in mobile download and upload speeds based on 1.36 million results from MyBroadband’s Android Speed Test App between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022.

In 2022, the mobile network provider had the greatest average download speed of 68.84Mbps, as well as the highest upload speed of 19.77Mbps.

In comparison, the average download and upload speeds are 48.58Mbps and 11.62Mbps, respectively. The following is a summary of the network speed comparison:

• MTN — 68.84Mbps download; 19.77Mbps upload; 44ms latency.
• Vodacom — 48.58Mbps download; 11.62Mbps upload; 38ms latency.
• Telkom — 28.54Mbps download; 9.95Mbps upload; 38ms latency.
• Cell C — 23.41Mbps download; 9.02Mbps upload; 47ms latency.