500 Mbps Fibre Cheap Megabits
The best rand-per-megabit on the ladder short of gigabit. A 50 GB game lands in about fourteen minutes, and a whole house can be doing everything at once without anyone noticing. The catch is that your Wi-Fi, not the line, decides what you actually get.
| Metric | Value | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest line | R749 | 500/500 Mbps · Mweb |
| Fastest line | 650 Mbps | R1 789/month · TT Connect |
| Best value | R1.50/Mbps | 500 Mbps at R749 |
| Symmetrical | 54 of 85 | packages upload at download speed |
What 500 Mbps actually gives you
Real-world expectations for a 500 Mbps fibre line, based on average device count, codec efficiency and SA peering as of 2026.
| Activity | Verdict | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| Uploading 4K video / raw footage | Great | The main reason to buy this tier. On a symmetrical line a 20 GB export goes up in about six minutes, and a 200 GB project archive in roughly an hour. |
| Whole-house cloud backup | Great | An initial 200 GB backup finishes in about an hour on a symmetrical package, rather than running for days in the background. |
| Game patch downloads | Great | A 50 GB game lands in roughly 14 minutes and a 100 GB patch in about 27 - fast enough that you stop planning around it. |
| Many simultaneous 4K streams | Great | Twenty concurrent 4K streams use roughly the whole line, which no household actually does. Streaming is not a constraint at this speed. |
| Live streaming while others use the line | Great | A 1080p60 stream needs around 9 Mbps up, under 2% of a symmetrical 500 Mbps line. |
| Several people working from home | Great | Four concurrent VPN and video-call workloads are a rounding error against this much capacity. |
| Getting the full speed over Wi-Fi | No | Be clear-eyed about this: a bundled router and a typical phone or laptop will not deliver 500 Mbps wirelessly. You need Wi-Fi 6 or 6E, a good position, and a close client - otherwise you are paying for capacity that stops at the router. |
| Getting the full speed on one device | ~ OK | Possible over Ethernet, but only if the whole path is gigabit. A 100 Mbps network port, an old switch or a cheap powerline adapter caps one machine at a fifth of the line no matter what you pay. |
Who 500 Mbps is built for
Enthusiast / Power User, best for heavy uploaders, large households. Here's where it shines and where it falls short.
Best for
- People who move large files dailyVideo editors, photographers, architects and anyone pushing multi-gigabyte projects to cloud storage. On a symmetrical line at this speed a day's footage uploads over a lunch break instead of overnight - and upload is the half of the connection that actually constrains this work.
- Large or shared householdsStudent houses, multi-generational homes and anywhere eight or more devices are genuinely active. At this speed contention stops being a thing you plan around; twenty concurrent 4K streams would still not saturate the line.
- Homes running several workdays at onceThree or four people on video calls, VPNs and continuous cloud sync, with streaming and gaming underneath. The line stops being the shared resource anyone has to negotiate over.
- Value buyers reading the per-megabit columnThis band is where rand-per-megabit bottoms out before gigabit. If you sort the table below by price-per-Mbps rather than by headline price, this is the tier that keeps winning - which is a different question from whether you can use it.
Not for you if
- You have not checked the gig tier - the cheapest gigabit package can cost less than a mid-priced line here, so compare both before buying
- Your household is four people or fewer with no heavy uploading; 100 or 200 Mbps will run everything you do and cost less
- You are on bundled or older Wi-Fi hardware - most of this speed will never reach your devices, and the router is the cheaper thing to fix first
- Your devices connect over 100 Mbps Ethernet or an old switch, which caps a single machine at a fifth of what you are paying for
- You mainly download rather than upload, and the asymmetric packages in this band are the cheap ones - read the upload figure before assuming symmetry
- You need a business SLA, guaranteed repair times or a static IP, which residential packages at this speed do not include
The case for 500 Mbps
Where rand-per-megabit bottoms out below gigabit
Monthly prices rise far more slowly than speeds do, so each rung up the ladder buys cheaper megabits than the one below it. This band has the lowest median price-per-Mbps of any tier short of gigabit. Every row in the table above shows its own price-per-Mbps, and the value-cliff block computes the medians from the live catalogue, so you can check that against today's prices rather than taking it on trust.
Check the gig tier before you buy here
This is the honest warning that belongs on this page. Because gigabit pricing is competitive and this band is not uniformly so, the cheapest gigabit packages we track can cost less per month than a mid-priced 500 Mbps line - not just less per megabit, less in absolute rands. The value-cliff block above computes the current gap in both directions. If it is negative, buying the slower tier is simply the worse deal, and you should follow the link up rather than order from this page.
Read the upload figure, not the headline
Roughly two thirds of this band is symmetrical and the rest is not - packages sold as 400/200 or 500/200 sit alongside matched 500/500 lines, and the asymmetric ones are often the cheaper entries. If you are buying this tier to upload, an asymmetric package removes most of the reason to buy it. The table lists download and upload for every package; compare the pair.
Your Wi-Fi becomes the product you are buying
At 100 Mbps almost any router copes. At 500 Mbps the bundled hardware is very often the ceiling, and the speed test you run on your phone across the house will not show anything like the line rate. Budget for a Wi-Fi 6 or 6E router, put it somewhere central, and measure on a cable before concluding the ISP is at fault. Spending on the router instead of the next speed tier is frequently the better purchase.
Narrower coverage than the middle of the ladder
Fewer networks carry this band than carry 50 or 100 Mbps, and the ones that do are not uniformly priced. That makes the network that reaches your address the single biggest factor in what this tier costs you - a far bigger factor than which ISP you pick. Check coverage first, then filter the table to the network you can actually order.
Still a residential product
These packages are uncapped and unshaped, but they are not business lines. No service-level agreement, no guaranteed repair window, no static IP and no priority on faults. If your income depends on the connection being up, the honest answer is to price a business product rather than to buy the fastest residential one.
Live 500 Mbps fibre deals
85 500 Mbps (or close) fibre deals across the 5 ISPs we track, on 32 networks. Sorted cheapest first.
Prices checked 22 September 2026 · price-per-Mbps shown on every deal
- Free-to-Use router
- Free setup worth R1725
- Free standard installation
- Free Wi-Fi router
- Free Wi-Fi router
- Free install + activation
- 60 free voice mins (Vobi)
- Promo: first 3 months
- Free Wi-Fi router
- Free install + activation
- 60 free voice mins (Vobi)
- Promo: first 3 months
- Free Wi-Fi router
- Free install + activation
- 60 free voice mins (Vobi)
- Promo: first 3-4 months
- FREE Wi-Fi router
- Install fee at signup
- Free standard installation
- Free Wi-Fi router
- Free standard installation
- Free Wi-Fi router
- FREE Wi-Fi router
- Save up to R5 000
- Free-to-use router
- Free install promo
500/500 Mbps Uncapped
500/500 Mbps Uncapped
400/200 Mbps Uncapped
400/400 Mbps Uncapped
500/200 Mbps Uncapped
500/500 Mbps Uncapped
500/200 Mbps Uncapped
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400/200 Mbps Uncapped
Showing 10 of 85 deals · Prices indicative · Sign-up via the listed ISP · Affiliate links may earn us a commission on referrals
The speed-tier value cliff
Fibre gets cheaper per megabit the faster it goes, and the drop is steep enough to invert the sticker price. Compare what a typical 500 Mbps line costs against the cheapest line one tier up.
| Tier | Packages | Median price | Median R/Mbps | Cheapest one tier up | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Mbps | 20 | R447 | R39.90 | 20 Mbps at R349 — Mweb on Fibre Geeks | −R98 |
| 20 Mbps | 86 | R525 | R19.75 | 40 Mbps at R427 — Afrihost on Openserve Web Connect | −R98 |
| 40 Mbps | 133 | R697 | R13.72 | 100 Mbps at R610 — Vox on Frogfoot | −R87 |
| 100 Mbps | 144 | R895 | R8.79 | 200 Mbps at R715 — Vox on Frogfoot | −R180 |
| 200 Mbps | 112 | R1 117 | R5.08 | 500 Mbps at R749 — Mweb on Metro Nexus | −R368 |
| 500 Mbps | 85 | R1 297 | R2.61 | 1 Gbps at R799 — Mweb on Cybersmart | −R498 |
Frequently asked questions
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