Telecommunications group MTN has maintained its title of South Africa’s best mobile network for 2025, with a Network Quality Score of 9.96.

MyBroadband Insights’ 2025 Mobile Network Quality Report found that Cell C maintained its position as the second-best operator with a Network Quality Score of 8.02, followed by Vodacom, which scored 7.69, Telkom with a score of 6.06, and Rain with a score of 4.38.

The findings were based on 1.3-million speed tests conducted by mobile users across South Africa during 2025, with testing data from crowdsourced users and dedicated drive tests.

As part of the drive testing, MyBroadband Insights travelled 73 000 km and tested networks across South Africa’s major cities, towns and roads, using high-end smartphones with support for the latest technologies, as well as mid-range devices that reflect the experience of typical users.

The 2025 edition of the report revealed that MTN dominated overall network performance and consistently outperformed its competitors across the most important metrics.

MTN has the highest average download speed of 83.94 Mb/s, an upload speed of 27.77 Mb/s and latency of 30 ms.

“MTN was also the top-performing network in major metropolitans, including Tshwane, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini and Mangaung. Its strong performance is attributed to continued investment in infrastructure for both LTE and 5G networks,” the MyBroadband report highlighted.

Cell C retained second place overall, ahead of Vodacom, with significantly better average upload speeds to compensate for the slightly slower download speed.

“Cell C's performance is closing in but not quite matching that of MTN, which hosts its virtual radio access network.”

Cell C’s average download speed for 2025 was 61.90 Mb/s, with upload speed of 27.27 Mb/s and latency of 36 ms.

Vodacom, which delivered the best 5G performance in the country driven by the ongoing investment in the latest network technologies, held the third place, with an average download speed of 67.02 Mb/s, an upload speed of 14.28 Mb/s and latency of 31 ms.

In 2025, Telkom had an average download speed of 44.94 Mb/s, an average upload speed of 12.10 Mb/s and latency of 30 ms; while Rain had a download speed of 22.13 Mb/s, an upload speed of 11.10 Mb/s and latency of 29 ms.