How to Make Your Internet Faster

Two fixes in one because they share a location decision. Wi-Fi signal halves with every concrete wall it passes through, so a router stuffed in the meter cupboard under the stairs gives you weak Wi-Fi everywhere upstairs. Put it on a shelf at chest height, central in the home, with line-of-sight to the rooms you use most. Don't lay it flat on the floor; don't put it inside a TV cabinet; don't sit it next to the microwave.

While you're moving it, plug both the router and the ONT (the white box with the green optical port - usually a Huawei HG8245H on Openserve or a ZTE F660 on Vumatel) into the same small UPS. During load-shedding, your fibre is still physically up at the kerb - the only thing taking it down is your own power. A 500VA / ~300Wh "mini UPS" stocked at any SA electronics retailer will run a typical ONT + router pair (combined draw ~15-25 W) for 4-8 hours, which covers any normal stage-2 to stage-4 slot. Bigger 1000VA towers will run an Apple TV or laptop charger as well.

Every device on Ethernet is one less device fighting for Wi-Fi airtime - and that's true even if the wired device isn't downloading anything, because Wi-Fi radios are half-duplex and shared. TVs, gaming consoles, Apple TVs, desktop PCs, NAS units and any device that lives in one spot all benefit from a wired connection. A 5-metre flat Cat 6 patch lead costs R60-R100 at Takealot, Incredible Connection or Game and runs along skirting boards almost invisibly.

Wiring high-bandwidth devices also matters for jitter on the devices that stay on Wi-Fi. The console saturating the 5 GHz channel for a Steam update is the same console that's making your spouse's Zoom call freeze; moving it to a wire fixes both at once.

The single biggest "free" speed upgrade for most SA homes is replacing or bypassing the supplied router. The defaults are tuned for cost, not performance:

• Huawei HG659 (legacy Telkom / Webafrica ADSL-era). Wi-Fi 5 wave 1, small NAT table, no MU-MIMO. If you're still using it on a fibre line, retire it. Any ~R900 Wi-Fi 6 router (TP-Link Archer AX23, Tenda TX3, Asus RT-AX55) will outperform it on every metric.
• Huawei HG8245H / HG8245W5 (Openserve ONT-router). The ONT side is fine; the Wi-Fi side is weak. Put it in bridge mode (the option is hidden but Openserve support will enable it remotely on request) and connect your own router downstream. Some homes see download throughput jump 30-50% just from this change.
• ZTE F660 / F670L (Vumatel ONT-router). Same story. The ONT works fine; the integrated Wi-Fi is mediocre and the 2.4 GHz radio in particular interferes with the 5 GHz under load. Bridge mode + downstream router is the right answer.
• TP-Link Archer C6 / Mercku M6 (Afrihost, Mweb, RSAWEB). Capable enough out the box but defaults often have band steering on, WMM Power Save on, and 5 GHz locked to a busy channel. Turn the first two off and manually pick a 5 GHz channel (36, 44, 149 or 157 are usually clean) and you'll see real-world Wi-Fi throughput climb 20-30%.

Whatever the router, run firmware updates - most have shipped a Wi-Fi 6E or stability fix in the last six months. The admin panel will tell you the current version vs latest.

If you've done all six fixes above and your wired (not Wi-Fi) speed test is still bad, the problem is upstream of your house. The trick is knowing whether to call the ISP (Webafrica, Afrihost, Cool Ideas) or the FNO (Vumatel, Openserve, Frogfoot, Octotel) - they're different companies, and only one of them can fix each kind of problem.

• Call the ISP first - always. Your contract is with them, they log the ticket, and they own the relationship with the FNO. They will escalate to the FNO on your behalf if it's a physical-layer problem.
• Symptoms that almost always mean the FNO: the ONT's LOS (loss-of-signal) light is red or flashing, line goes down completely after rain, the whole street is offline (knock on a neighbour's door and ask), wired speed test shows nothing - not slow, nothing.
• Symptoms that almost always mean the ISP: ONT is happy (green LOS), wired speed is fine but jitter is high to specific services, peak-hour congestion only on certain sites, DNS resolution slow but pings to IPs fine, one ISP-side service (their email, their VoIP) down while everything else works.
• If the ISP can't help in 48 hours, change ISP not network. The FNO line stays in place; the new ISP re-provisions it on their side within 24-72 hours. Our SA fibre ISP reviews rank ISPs by support response time as well as speed.

When you do call, lead with numbers. "My wired speed test shows 34 Mbps on a 100 Mbps line at 19h15 on Tuesday, peak-hour jitter 65 ms" gets you a level-2 engineer. "My internet is slow" gets you the level-1 script that ends with "have you tried turning it off and on again."