MyBroadband has released it's Q1 2019 report on the best and worst Internet Service Providers in South Africa, based on speed and customer satisfaction. Let's take a look at the findings.
•	630 130 speed tests were conducted on MyBroadband's web-based speed test platform between 1 January and 31 March 2019.
•	330 958 WiFi speed tests were conducted on MyBroadband's speed test app during the same period, 1 January to 31 March 2019.
After any user performs a speed test on either of MyBroadband's speed test platforms, web-based or app, they are then asked to rate their ISP. These customer satisfaction ratings are then used to rank South Africa's ISP's.
In order to ensure a neutral speed testing environment – an even playing field, so to speak – MyBroadband's HTML5 speed test servers are hosted in Teraco's vendor-neutral data centres, with speed test servers at NAPAfrica's peering points in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.
These testing platforms accurately measure internet speed, rather than on-net speed, which most other speed test services use. We literally have no idea what the difference is, but it sounds impressive.
Anyway, enough with all the technical stuff. Let's get to what you really came here for – the results.
Which is South Africa's best and worst (the worst is Telkom, let's not even pretend here) Internet Service Provider?
The table below provides an indication of the average speeds recorded by internet users across South Africa. MyBroadband has emphasised that these results should not be interpreted as an indication of network quality, but as a general overview of the connectivity profile of the particular ISP's subscribers.
Cool Ideas – which has been praised year after year – came in top spot with an average download speed of 26.66 Mbps and an average upload speed of 21.314 Mbps.
MWEB crawled into last place with an average download speed (if you can even call it that) of 6.66 Mbps and a sad, sad upload speed of 2.42 Mbps.
The following table ranks South Africa's big-name ISP's based on the average ratings received through MyBroadband's web-based and mobile app speed tests. MyBroadband noted that the same ISP's who topped the speed ranking list also ranked extraordinarily well in customer satisfaction ratings. Fancy that.
According to the findings, the best Internet Service Provider in South Africa is Cool Ideas, followed by Supersonic in second place and then CipherWave in third.
The three absolute worst Internet Service Providers in South Africa came as no surprise. The standard of service that we ourselves experienced from Internet Solutions while putting together our Best ADSL Buyer's Guide for last year was so abhorrent that we omitted the company from our guide entirely. We just can't expose out readers to such levels of ineptitude.
MWEB, then, has long been a totem of incompetence in the industry. No surprise that it ranked second worst.
And finally, the worst Internet Service Provider in South Africa – with an approval rating of just 2.6 out of 5 – is Telkom, whose idea of internet is akin to something like two tin cans and a string.
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