Uncapped Fibre from R99

There are 682 uncapped plans in the table above, spread across 45 fibre networks. They are not interchangeable: the cheapest way onto Octotel is R99 a month, while the same question on Cybersmart starts at R879. Which networks reach your address is usually decided for you, so the useful comparison is within a network rather than across the whole list.

The last column is the best rand-per-Mbps available anywhere on that network, at any speed — not the unit price of the cheapest line beside it. The two are rarely close, and the gap is the argument against buying on headline price. The entry tier in this segment is R99 for 100 Mbps on Octotel, which is R0.99 per Mbps; the best unit price in the whole segment is R0.40 per Mbps. Paying a little more for a much faster line is usually the better deal; paying the minimum almost never is.

The first row is the number that gets advertised, and it is the one to ignore. Octotel is discounted from R845 to R99 for the first 2 months, then steps up by R746 a month — a 754% increase on the rate that sold you the line. Over two years that is R19 038 rather than the R2 376 the headline price implies, which works out at R793 a month rather than R99. Budget on the standing rate and treat the discount as a rebate on the first few months. The totals above include the R250 once-off charge this line carries, but not a router you buy outright. Cancellation terms are the other cost that does not appear in a monthly price: no fixed term is not the same as no cancellation fee, and several ISPs here claw back a waived install if you leave inside six or twelve months.

Looking wider than this segment? Compare every fibre deal we track puts the full catalogue in one sortable table, and the cheapest fibre deals ranks the whole market on price and rand-per-Mbps rather than within one network.

Three words get used as if they mean the same thing, and they do not. A package can be uncapped and still be slowed down. Knowing which promise you are actually buying is the difference between a line that behaves the way you expected and a monthly argument with support.

Every line in the table on this page is uncapped, unshaped, unthrottled and billed monthly, because the page filters to exactly that. Prepaid passes are deliberately excluded: a pass buys a window rather than a month, so listing one beside monthly rates would compare two different things and make the pass look like the cheapest deal on the page when it is not.

The honest caveat is contention. None of these words promise you the full line speed at 20:00 on a Sunday. What they promise is that nothing in your contract is deliberately slowing you down. Congestion on the network operator’s side is a separate problem, and it is the one worth asking neighbours about before you sign.

There is a bigger caveat, and it is about the word itself. We track 684 monthly-billed residential fibre packages across 7 ISPs, and 682 of them are sold uncapped — 99.7%. In South African fibre, “uncapped” is not a feature you shop for. It is the default, and filtering for it removes almost nothing from your shortlist.

That is worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual advice. The question is not “is this line uncapped”; it almost certainly is. The questions that still separate these packages are who you buy it from and whether the price survives the first quarter — and the next two sections put numbers on both.

Once uncapped is a given, the largest remaining variable is the shop. Fibre is wholesale: the network operator builds and runs the line, and the ISP bills you for it. So where two ISPs sell the same speed on the same network, you are buying a physically identical product, and the entire price difference is the reseller’s margin.

Of the 292 distinct uncapped lines we track, 161 are sold by two or more ISPs. Across those the gap between the cheapest and dearest seller runs to a median of R115 a month and R1 205 over a costed year. The ten below are the lines with the most sellers — five each, the most any line in this catalogue has.

The practical consequence: picking the network before the ISP is the wrong order. Check which networks reach your street, then compare every ISP selling on the one you can get. Our fibre deal comparison does that side by side, and cheapest fibre deals ranks the floor.

Uncapped plans are easy to compare on price and hard to compare on value, because a cheaper line is often a much slower one. Rand per megabit settles it: it divides the monthly price by the download speed, so a R399 20 Mbps line and a R799 100 Mbps line become directly comparable. Lower is better, and the spread across the 682 uncapped plans we track is wider than most readers expect.

Read it alongside the next section rather than on its own. These bars use the advertised rate, so a line sitting on a deep promotion looks better here than it will in month seven. The reverts-to table below is the corrective.

About 33% of the uncapped lines listed above are promotional rates rather than standing ones. The headline price is real, but it is not what you pay indefinitely - and the gap between the promo and the rate it reverts to is frequently larger than the gap between two ISPs you were agonising over.

We do publish the two-year total, and the block above this section works it out: for 226 of the 228 promotional uncapped lines on this page, the operator states how many months the promo runs, so the step-up can be billed at the month it actually happens rather than assumed. Those totals also carry the once-off installation or activation charge where the operator publishes one, because year one is the year you pay it.

The 2 remaining lines are the honest exception, and they are left out rather than estimated. They are Herotel lines, and the discount is published without a committed length, so picking one would invent the number the whole exercise is meant to establish. For those, ask how many months the promo runs before you sign, and budget on the reverts-to column in the meantime.

Which brings up something the table above cannot show, because it ranks individual lines: promo exposure is not spread evenly across the ISPs. It is close to an ISP-level pricing strategy, and it changes what a price on this page is worth depending only on whose row you are reading.

The two ends of that table are the most useful thing on this page. Afrihost and Accelerit price every one of their 242 uncapped lines at a standing rate, so the number you see is the number you pay in month eighteen. At the other end, MWeb prices 117 of its 143 uncapped lines on a promo — 82% of its own catalogue. Neither is dishonest, and a promo is real money while it runs. But comparing a promotional rate against a standing one and calling the cheaper number the better deal is the single most common way to overpay for fibre in this market.

The practical rule: compare the reverts-to column, not the promo column, if you intend to stay longer than a year. On a month-to-month contract you can leave when the rate jumps, which is exactly why month-to-month fibre deals are worth preferring where the price is close.

An uncapped line is the right default for most South African households, but it is not the right answer for everyone, and there is no version of this page that earns anything by pretending otherwise.

• You use very little data and the line is idle most of the month. A single person who browses and streams one show an evening is buying insurance against a cap they would never have hit. A cheaper entry-level line at a lower speed is the better trade - start at 10 Mbps or 20 Mbps rather than paying for headroom.
• You do not have a debit order or want no contract at all. Prepaid fibre products exist for exactly this and they are not listed here, because they are not monthly products. That is a real gap in this page, not an argument against them.
• Your household is small and your router is old. Buying a faster uncapped line changes nothing if the bottleneck is the hardware in your lounge. Test on a cable first; replacing the router is usually the cheaper fix.
• You need a service-level agreement or a static IP. Every package on this page is residential. Uncapped is not the same as guaranteed, and none of these carry a repair-time commitment. If your income depends on the line, price a business product instead.
• Fibre has not reached your street. No amount of comparing helps until a network is live at your address. Start with the fibre coverage map, then come back and filter this table to the network that actually reaches you.