Vodacom has come out on top in two separate network-quality assessments published by MyBroadband Insights this year, with the operator’s 5G and voice networks both posting the strongest results among South Africa’s major carriers. The findings, drawn from hundreds of thousands of real-world tests run across the country, give Vodacom fresh bragging rights heading into the final stretch of 2026 and sharpen an already intense rivalry with MTN, Telkom, Cell C and Rain for the title of South Africa’s best mobile network.
MyBroadband reported that Vodacom’s 5G network averaged a download speed of 260.12 Mbps, an upload speed of 26.02 Mbps and latency of 24 ms across the third quarter of 2026. Separately, a voice-quality study covering the spring months found Vodacom posting a 1.70-second average call setup time, a 96.68% call setup success ratio, a 1.68% dropped-call ratio and a speech-quality score of 4.44 out of 5 on the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) scale, for an overall score of 75.30. Both reports, detailed by MyBroadband, point to the same conclusion from two different angles: when it comes to raw speed and reliable voice calls, Vodacom’s 5G network South Africa performance currently leads the pack.
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How MyBroadband Insights Tested South Africa’s Networks
MyBroadband Insights runs two distinct testing programs that feed into South Africa’s informal league table of network quality, and both played a role in this round of results. The voice-quality study ran from 2 May 2026 to 15 June 2026, a six-week window chosen to capture call behavior across weekdays, weekends and varying network load. The 5G speed study covered a longer stretch, from 1 July 2026 to 30 September 2026, and pulled in 296,405 individual speed tests gathered from thousands of devices across the country.
That scale matters. A single speed test on a single device, taken in one spot, tells you almost nothing about a national network. Nearly 300,000 tests spread across a full quarter and thousands of handsets give a far more reliable picture of what ordinary users actually experience when they open an app, start a video call or stream a match on a Saturday afternoon. The voice test works differently, since call setup time, success ratio and MOS scores require dedicated test calls rather than crowd-sourced app data, which is why that study leans on a tighter, controlled sample over a shorter period.
The Voice Network Testing Window
The spring voice-quality run spanned a month and a half, long enough to smooth out one-off outages or localized congestion that might skew a shorter test. Vodacom’s 1.70-second call setup time measures how long it takes for a call to connect after the number is dialed, a figure that most users never consciously notice unless it climbs toward three or four seconds. The 96.68% success ratio means fewer than four calls in 100 failed to connect at all, while the 1.68% dropped-call ratio tracks how many connected calls cut out mid-conversation.
The 5G Network Testing Window
The summer-to-autumn 5G window stretched across three full months, giving MyBroadband’s testers time to capture performance during both off-peak hours and the evening rush when millions of South Africans stream video, game online or back up photos simultaneously. Running nearly 300,000 tests over that period also helps flatten out the effect of any single tower having a bad week due to maintenance or a localized fault.
Vodacom’s 5G Numbers: 260 Mbps Download, 24ms Latency
The headline figure from the 5G study is a 260.12 Mbps average download speed, a number that comfortably clears what most streaming, gaming and video-calling applications need to run smoothly. Upload speed averaged 26.02 Mbps, a metric that matters increasingly as more South Africans post video, join work calls from home or back up phone photos directly to the cloud. Latency, the delay between a device requesting data and a server responding, came in at 24 ms, low enough to support real-time applications like cloud gaming or video conferencing without the lag that frustrates users on older networks.
Here’s how those headline numbers break down:
| Metric | National Average | Nelson Mandela Bay | Cape Town |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5G download speed | 260.12 Mbps | 300 Mbps | 234 Mbps |
| 5G upload speed | 26.02 Mbps | Not broken out | Not broken out |
| Latency | 24 ms | Not broken out | Not broken out |
| Test window | 1 Jul 2026 – 30 Sep 2026 | 1 Jul 2026 – 30 Sep 2026 | 1 Jul 2026 – 30 Sep 2026 |
| Sample size | 296,405 tests | Included in national total | Included in national total |
Source: MyBroadband Insights, as reported by The Citizen.
Regional Breakdown: Nelson Mandela Bay Outpaces Cape Town
City-level results showed real variation. Vodacom’s average 5G download speed hit 300 Mbps in Nelson Mandela Bay, well above the 234 Mbps recorded in Cape Town. Both figures sit comfortably above the national average of 260.12 Mbps, but the gap between the two metro areas is wide enough to matter for anyone deciding where to live, work or run a small business that depends on a fast mobile connection.
That kind of city-to-city variation is normal for 5G networks everywhere, not just in South Africa. Coverage density, tower spacing, available spectrum in a given area and how much traffic a city generates at any given hour all shape the numbers a test like this produces. Smaller or less densely packed metros often post faster average speeds simply because fewer devices are competing for the same radio capacity, which may help explain why Nelson Mandela Bay outperformed the larger, more congested Cape Town market in this round of testing.
Voice Quality Deep Dive: Call Setup and Dropped Calls
While 5G speed numbers tend to dominate headlines, the voice-quality study arguably says more about day-to-day reliability. A fast data connection does not help much if a phone call keeps dropping or takes several seconds to connect. Vodacom’s voice results, covering the testing period from 2 May to 15 June 2026, painted a picture of consistent call performance across the sample.
| Voice Metric | Vodacom Result |
|---|---|
| Average call setup time | 1.70 seconds |
| Call setup success ratio | 96.68% |
| Dropped-call ratio | 1.68% |
| Speech-quality MOS score | 4.44 / 5 |
| Overall voice score | 75.30 |
| Test window | 2 May 2026 – 15 Jun 2026 |
Source: MyBroadband Insights.
A 4.44 MOS score is particularly notable because the scale tops out at 5, meaning Vodacom’s call audio quality landed close to what engineers consider indistinguishable from a clean, uncompressed voice signal. South Korea’s carriers have shown in separate testing just how sensitive call setup time can be to the underlying technology, with one widely cited comparison of 4G VoLTE against 5G VoNR voice call quality finding that older 4G voice technology actually connected calls faster than newer 5G voice standards in Seoul. That context makes Vodacom’s 1.70-second setup time look even more competitive, since it was achieved without necessarily sacrificing the reliability gains that newer voice technology is supposed to deliver.
How Vodacom Stacks Up Against South Africa’s Other Carriers
South Africa’s mobile market is not a one-horse race, and the country’s network-quality rankings have shifted hands more than once over the past year. Engineering News reported in April 2026 that MTN held the top overall network position in an earlier round of MyBroadband’s quarterly testing, a reminder that these rankings move with each new testing cycle rather than settling permanently on one operator. The latest results shift the spotlight back to Vodacom specifically on the 5G speed and voice quality metrics, even as the broader competitive picture across South Africa’s four major networks, Vodacom, MTN, Telkom and Cell C, along with newer entrant Rain, remains tightly contested.
This back-and-forth is good news for consumers, even if it makes for a confusing marketing landscape. When operators know a well-respected, independently run testing program is measuring their networks every quarter, they have a direct incentive to keep investing in towers, spectrum and backhaul capacity rather than coasting on reputation. South Africa’s experience here echoes patterns seen elsewhere, including in India, where Ericsson has pointed to surging AI-driven data traffic as a reason operators are racing to expand 5G capacity well beyond 500 million connections. The underlying driver in both markets is the same: data usage keeps climbing, and networks that fall behind on speed or reliability lose customers to rivals that do not.
Historical Context: A Multi-Year Race for Network Bragging Rights
South Africa’s mobile operators have spent years jostling for the kind of independent validation that MyBroadband Insights now provides on a recurring basis. Vodacom’s own corporate materials point to a long history of network and service accolades, which the operator lists on its awards and credentials page as part of its broader brand positioning across the African continent. That track record matters commercially, since network quality claims are one of the few concrete, testable differentiators operators can point to when most data plans and handset subsidies look broadly similar across competitors.
What has changed over the past few years is the sophistication of the testing itself. Where network quality claims once rested largely on operator-supplied data or anecdotal user reports, large-scale crowd-sourced testing covering hundreds of thousands of individual data points now gives South African consumers a far more rigorous basis for comparison. That shift mirrors a global trend in telecoms, where independent benchmarking organizations increasingly hold operators accountable to real-world performance rather than marketing claims alone, a dynamic also visible in how carriers worldwide are deploying newer standards like 5G Advanced under Release 18 to squeeze out further performance gains.
Why Download Speed and Voice Quality Still Matter in 2026
It would be easy to assume that in an era dominated by messaging apps and video calls, traditional voice quality has become a secondary concern. The data suggests otherwise. South Africans still place a high volume of standard voice calls daily, whether for business, banking security checks or simply staying in touch with family, and a network that drops 1.68% of those calls or takes nearly two seconds to connect them creates a measurably worse experience than one that does not.
On the data side, a 260.12 Mbps average 5G download speed puts Vodacom’s network in a position to comfortably support bandwidth-heavy use cases that are becoming mainstream across South Africa, from 4K video streaming to cloud gaming and remote work. Consumers upgrading their home Wi-Fi setups increasingly expect mobile networks to keep pace, a dynamic visible in the broader hardware market too, where devices like the recently launched devolo BE9300 Wi-Fi 7 router are built to handle multi-gigabit speeds that would have been unthinkable on home networks just a few years ago. Mobile 5G networks increasingly need to match that ambition, since many households now rely on mobile data as a primary or backup internet connection rather than a secondary one, a shift that technologies such as mobile edge computing are helping networks absorb without a drop in responsiveness.
Market and Business Impact for Vodacom
For Vodacom, topping both the 5G and voice rankings in the same reporting cycle gives the operator a strong marketing hook heading into the final months of 2026, a period when South African consumers typically reassess contracts and compare operators ahead of the new year. Independent, third-party validation of network performance carries more weight with consumers than operator-supplied marketing claims, which is precisely why these MyBroadband Insights results matter commercially as much as technically.
Beyond the immediate marketing value, strong 5G and voice performance also supports Vodacom’s broader push into enterprise and business connectivity services, an area the operator has been actively building out through its Vodacom Now business technology platform. Reliable mobile network performance underpins everything from point-of-sale systems at small retailers to field service operations that depend on constant connectivity, so a verified lead in both speed and call reliability gives Vodacom’s enterprise sales teams concrete numbers to cite when competing for business contracts against MTN and Telkom.
What This Means for Rivals: MTN, Telkom, Cell C and Rain
South Africa’s other major operators now face pressure to respond, even though specific competing performance figures from this exact testing round were not included in the reports reviewed for this article. MTN’s prior quarterly win, noted by Engineering News, shows the company has the network infrastructure to compete at the top of these rankings, which suggests the current gap to Vodacom on 5G and voice metrics may be more about a particular testing window than a structural technology deficit.
Telkom and Cell C, both smaller by subscriber count than Vodacom and MTN, face a tougher challenge in matching network-wide averages purely because of scale economics in tower deployment and spectrum holdings. Rain, which built its brand around aggressive 5G and fixed-wireless pricing, continues to compete on value rather than claiming outright speed leadership in national testing. The practical takeaway for South African consumers comparing operators is that no single network dominates every metric in every testing cycle, so recent results from an independent source like MyBroadband Insights remain one of the more reliable snapshots available at any given time.
Industry Reaction to the Latest Network Rankings
Coverage of the results spread quickly across South African and international technology outlets. MyBroadband, which conducted the underlying testing, published the initial findings and broke down the methodology behind both the voice and 5G studies. The Citizen picked up the 5G results with a focus on the regional city-level breakdown, highlighting the gap between Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town. Business Day and The Economic Times also flagged the story as part of broader coverage of South Africa’s telecoms sector, reflecting the fact that network quality rankings carry weight well beyond South Africa’s borders given Vodacom’s presence across multiple African markets.
That multi-outlet pickup underscores how closely South Africa’s telecoms sector gets watched, both domestically and by international business media tracking emerging-market connectivity trends. Network quality data increasingly functions as an economic indicator in its own right, since reliable, fast mobile connectivity correlates closely with digital commerce growth, remote work adoption and the kind of mobile banking usage that has become central to South Africa’s financial sector.
5 Predictions for South Africa’s Network Race Through 2027
- Testing cycles will keep reshuffling the leaderboard. Given that MTN topped overall rankings earlier in 2026 before Vodacom’s 5G and voice results took the spotlight, expect the next quarterly cycle to produce another shift as operators adjust capacity and coverage.
- 5G download speeds will keep climbing nationally. As operators densify networks and roll out additional spectrum, national average 5G speeds across South Africa are likely to trend upward from the 260.12 Mbps baseline Vodacom posted this quarter.
- Regional speed gaps will persist. The 66 Mbps difference between Nelson Mandela Bay and Cape Town in this round suggests metro-level variation will remain a feature of South African 5G performance rather than something that disappears quickly.
- Voice quality will stay a competitive differentiator. Even as data usage grows, operators will continue marketing call setup times and dropped-call ratios because these numbers are easy for ordinary consumers to understand and compare.
- Enterprise connectivity will become a bigger battleground. Expect Vodacom, MTN and Telkom to lean harder into business-focused network claims as they compete for corporate contracts where reliability metrics carry direct commercial weight.
What South African Consumers Should Take Away From This
For everyday users deciding which network to pick, the practical message is straightforward. Vodacom’s current numbers, a 260.12 Mbps average 5G download speed and a 75.30 overall voice score, represent some of the strongest independently verified results in the South African market as of this reporting period. That does not mean every Vodacom customer in every location will experience those exact figures, since individual results depend heavily on local tower density, device capability and time of day. It does mean that, on balance, Vodacom’s network currently performs well against the metrics that matter most for everyday calling and data use.
Consumers weighing a switch should also remember that network quality tables change every testing cycle. Decisions based purely on a single quarter’s results risk being outdated by the time a new contract locks in, which is why ongoing coverage of independent testing programs like MyBroadband Insights remains valuable well beyond this single report.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did MyBroadband Insights find about Vodacom’s 5G network?
MyBroadband Insights reported that Vodacom’s 5G network averaged a 260.12 Mbps download speed, a 26.02 Mbps upload speed and 24 ms latency across testing conducted from 1 July 2026 to 30 September 2026, drawing on 296,405 individual speed tests.
How did Vodacom’s voice network perform?
In testing conducted from 2 May 2026 to 15 June 2026, Vodacom recorded a 1.70-second average call setup time, a 96.68% call setup success ratio, a 1.68% dropped-call ratio, a 4.44 speech-quality MOS score and an overall score of 75.30.
Which cities had the fastest Vodacom 5G speeds?
Nelson Mandela Bay recorded the fastest average 5G download speed among the cities named in the report, at 300 Mbps, compared with 234 Mbps in Cape Town.
Did MTN or other carriers also rank highly in 2026 testing?
Engineering News reported that MTN held the top overall network position in an earlier MyBroadband quarterly test in April 2026, showing that rankings have shifted between operators across different testing cycles this year. Specific competing figures for MTN, Telkom, Cell C or Rain in this exact testing round were not available in the sources reviewed for this article.
How many tests did MyBroadband Insights run for the 5G study?
The 5G study drew on 296,405 individual speed tests collected from thousands of devices across South Africa between 1 July 2026 and 30 September 2026.
Is Vodacom’s network performance guaranteed for every user?
No. These figures represent national and city-level averages drawn from large test samples. Individual experience varies by location, device, time of day and local network congestion.
Where can I see Vodacom’s full list of network awards?
Vodacom maintains a running list of network and service accolades on its corporate awards and credentials page, which covers recognition across its African markets.
Why does voice quality still matter if most people use messaging apps?
Standard voice calls remain common for business communication, banking verification and everyday contact in South Africa, so call setup time, dropped-call ratio and speech clarity continue to shape user satisfaction regardless of messaging app adoption.
