South African fibre, measured

1. The megabit gets dramatically cheaper as the line gets faster

This is the single most useful fact in South African fibre pricing, and it is not subtle. The median entry-level line (Up to 25 Mbps) costs R26.68 for every megabit of download. At 1 Gbps and above the median is R1.51 - roughly 18× cheaper per megabit. The monthly bill still rises, from a median of R479 to R1 509, but you are buying far more for each extra rand. Anyone choosing between 20 and 50 Mbps to save money is shopping in the worst-value part of the market.

2. The same speed can cost you 4 times as much

Identical download speeds carry wildly different prices depending on the network underneath. At 20 Mbps the dearest package in our catalogue costs 4.45× the cheapest - R912 on Netstream against R205 on Openserve Web Connect, for the same line speed. The gap is narrowest at 200 Mbps, where the dearest is only 1.53× the cheapest. Broadly, the thinly-traded tiers carry the widest spreads and the busiest ones the narrowest - 100 Mbps has the most offers of any tier at 74 - but the relationship is loose enough that the only safe move is to check your own address rather than assume a tier is competitive.

3. Your street decides your price far more than your ISP does

Compare the two rankings below. Across networks with at least 10 packages in our catalogue, the median cost per megabit runs from R4.50 on Frogfoot to R32.85 on Netstream - a spread of 7.3×. Across ISPs, the same measure runs from R7.89 to R9.95 - a spread of just 1.26×.

In other words: which fibre network happens to be trenched down your road moves your bill several times more than which ISP you sign the contract with. That is a consequence of South Africa's open-access model - ISPs resell the same wholesale ports at thin, similar margins, so the wholesale price sets the floor. It is also why the first question is always which networks reach your address, not which ISP has the best advertisement.

One honest caveat: ISP catalogues cover different mixes of networks and speeds, so neither ranking is a controlled comparison. The size of the difference between the two spreads is the point, not the exact position of any single row.

4. Matched upload is a network decision, not an ISP one

If you work from home, back up to the cloud or stream out, upload speed matters more than the headline download figure. It is almost entirely determined by the network. Of the networks with at least 10 packages we track, 9 ship matched upload on every single package (TT Connect, Evotel, Comtel Fibre, DNATel, Fibonacci, Clear Access, FibreSuburb Networks, Link Africa, Netstream), while 8 give matched upload on half their range or less (Frogfoot, Vumatel, Openserve, Fibre Geeks, Octotel, Thinkspeed, Vuma Reach, Openserve Web Connect). No ISP can change this: they resell whatever profile the network sells them.

There is a trap here worth checking before you upgrade. On 7 of the networks that sell both profiles - Metro Nexus, Zoom Fibre, Open Fibre, Vumatel, Link Layer and 2 others - matched upload sits on the slower products, not the faster ones. On Metro Nexus the median symmetric line runs at 100 Mbps against 1 000 Mbps for the median asymmetric one. Paying more for a faster line on those networks can mean giving up the matched upload you already had. It is not a universal pattern: on the other mixed networks the two profiles sit at much the same speeds, which is exactly why the per-network columns below are worth reading rather than a single market average.

Judged purely per download megabit, asymmetric packages look cheaper than symmetric ones. That is a composition effect rather than a discount: asymmetric products cluster at high download speeds with a fraction of the upload, so the denominator flatters them. Compare like with like before concluding you are saving money.