Vodacom, MTN, and Telkom share MyBroadband Best Voice Network in South Africa award – MyBroadband

Vodacom, Telkom, and MTN are joint winners of the MyBroadband Best Voice Network in South Africa award.

This result was revealed in South Africa’s largest-ever voice network quality testing project, conducted by MyBroadband Insights in partnership with Keysight distributor Coral-i.

The testing used Keysight’s network testing platform, Nemo, a world-leading testing system used by operators and regulators globally.

The project assessed the mobile voice network performance of Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, and Telkom across the country.

It tracked key performance indicators such as Call Setup Success Ratio (CSSR), Dropped Call Ratio (DCR), Call Setup Time (CST), and Speech Quality Mean Opinion Score (MOS).

Between 15 May and 4 July, MyBroadband Insights covered over 10,000 kilometres, made over 38,000 calls, and recorded over 633 hours of call data.

The testing evaluated the performance of the voice networks in all of South Africa’s large cities, secondary cities, and smaller towns.

MyBroadband also conducted testing while travelling on South Africa’s major roads, including the N1, N2, N3, and other highways.

This setup includes an originating and terminating station, each consisting of four Android devices running custom firmware to enable more in-depth measurement of network KPIs.

The terminating setup is placed in an office with good signal quality on all four mobile networks supporting voice calls — Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, and Cell C.

The office has backup power to ensure these devices are always available and will not be disrupted by unexpected power outages.

The results were collated according to the globally recognized European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) specifications.

Vodacom, Telkom, and MTN all performed exceptionally well, earning the title of joint winners for the best voice network in South Africa.

Each of these three networks excelled in different areas of the tests:

• Vodacom recorded the fastest average call setup time at only 1.51 seconds.
• Telkom achieved the highest speech quality MOS of 4.3.
• MTN had the fewest dropped calls, with a rate of just 1.12%.

Cell C finished in last place and had the worst performance in all but one category.

The table below provides an overview of the voice network quality for Vodacom, Telkom, MTN, and Cell C in South Africa:

* joint winners