Opensignal: South Africa has Africa's fastest download speed

New analysis from Opensignal shows smartphone users in South Africa enjoy the fastest download speeds and the most consistent quality of mobile services in Africa, ahead of Morocco, Egypt and Kenya.

The research looked at the experience of smartphone users across 15 markets in Africa and found diverse results across the continent.

The data for the report was collected via Opensignal users between March 1, 2023, and May 29, 2023.

South Africa was in first place for download speed experience at 27.3 Mbit/s: 16.8% faster than second-placed Morocco.

Egypt and Kenya are in a statistical tie for third place, with scores of 16.3 Mbit/s and 16.2 Mbit/s.

(Source: Opensignal)

Morocco leads for upload speed experience, with a score of 7.5 Mbit/s, beating Algeria by 1.3 Mbit/s (21.7%). South Africa and Kenya jointly take third place, with respective scores of 5.8 Mbit/s and 5.7 Mbit/s.

Meanwhile, Sudan brings up the rear for both download speed experience and upload speed experience, with scores of 5.7 Mbit/s and 2 Mbit/s, respectively.

Consistent connectivity

Smartphone users in South Africa also enjoy the most consistent mobile network experience in Africa, as the market leads with a score of 50.9%. This is 4.9 percentage points ahead of second-placed Egypt and 5.6 percentage points ahead of third-placed Morocco.

These scores reflect the percentage of tests in which our smartphone users' experience on a network is sufficient to support the requirements of more common demanding applications, such as video calling, uploading an image to social media or using smart home applications.

Tests combine different experience indicators such as download speed, upload speed, latency, jitter, packet discard and time to first byte.

In Ghana, Sudan and Côte d'Ivoire, the percentage of successful tests was below 10%, with Ethiopia and Cameroon scoring as low as 0.1%.

"These relatively low scores are likely due to the high usage of old 3G technology in those markets," said Opensignal analyst and the report's author, Robert Wyrzykowski.

Older technologies equal worse experience

The authors said slower speeds and worse experiential scores for some African markets were because smartphone users in those markets still spend a large proportion of time connected to older network generations — like 3G or 2G — which are much less capable than 4G.

Opensignal smartphone users in Ethiopia spend almost 47% of their time connected to 3G services, while users in Angola spend over 41% of their time on a 3G network. Users in Uganda, Ghana and Sudan spend more than 30% of the time on 3G.

"Limited spectrum bandwidth, together with heavy use of 3G connectivity and lower maximum data transfer rates adversely affects the quality of the overall mobile network experience in African markets," Wyrzykowski said.

(Source: Opensignal)

"The extent of 3G usage is due to the cost of mobile infrastructure (backhaul, security at base stations), energy (fuel and generators) and local deployment regulator fees — along with many users still reliant on older and simpler mobile devices, not enabled for newer generations," the author continued.

Solar-power cells are one of the potential solutions for deploying basestations in remote areas, while the production of low-cost and more affordable smartphones can help users access mobile services more easily and boost their experience when using the Internet for work, education and entertainment.

2G is still notable in some African markets. For example, smartphone users spend more than 5% of their time connected to 2G in Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.

Opensignal's smartphone users in Sudan, Morocco, Angola and Cameroon spend the highest proportion of time with no signal among African markets, ranging from 3.3% to 4.9% of the time, which makes connecting to mobile services even more challenging.

Next-gen technologies gain traction

Next-generation technologies like 4G and 5G are gaining traction in most markets, and South African users spend 85.6% of their time on a 4G or 5G network. Egyptian users are connected to 4G or 5G for 77.7% of the time while Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire all have 4G or 5G connectivity over 70% of the time.

"Several markets in Africa have already deployed 5G networks, like South Africa, Nigeria or Kenya. At the moment, the presence of 5G connectivity is poor on the continent, with only South Africa having a more substantial number of 5G subscriptions, while others observe only several thousand of 5G users," Wyrzykowski said.

"Further development of seamless and reliable mobile connectivity in Africa is essential for the markets’ economic growth, especially given the high numbers of mobile-only users," he added.

Wyrzykowski believes the road to ubiquitous 5G in Africa is likely to be a long one, as access to 4G is still not universal and many users still rely on 2G and 3G networks to connect to the mobile Internet.

Mobile-first continent

Opensignal's research shows that in several African markets, more than 40% of smartphone users predominantly use the Internet via a mobile service only and not on Wi-Fi. In Ghana about 58% of users are mobile-only Internet users, as are 56% of users in Sudan and 55% in Uganda.

"This reflects the relative lack of fixed infrastructure in Africa and its mobile-first character," the authors said.

(Source: Opensignal)

By contrast, less than 10% of smartphone users in South Africa or Egypt only use mobile connectivity.

South Africa and Egypt had the highest scores for video experience and the three North African markets of Morocco, Egypt and Algeria were front-runners for games experience.

(Source: Opensignal)

*Top image source: rawpixel.com on Freepik.

— Paula Gilbert, Editor, Connecting Africa