South Africa’s biggest mobile data munchers – MyBroadband

One of South Africa’s biggest mobile data consumers used a monthly average of more than 5TB on a capped package in the first half of the year.

Mobile data traffic has surged in South Africa over the past few years as smartphone penetration has increased and applications like video streaming and instant chat apps have seen increased adoption.

MyBroadband asked the country’s major mobile networks for the data consumption figures of their top five users during the first six months of 2024.

It is important to note that this information excludes any personally identifiable details, with only the subscriber’s package and data consumption figure shared.

Vodacom was the only operator that provided specific data consumption figures.

South Africa’s biggest mobile network said that overall data traffic on its mobile network increased 36.2% in the 2024 financial year.

“The average usage per smart device in FY 2024 increased by 26.0% to 3.8GB per month,” Vodacom said.

The five hungriest Vodacom mobile data consumers consumed significantly more.

Four of the five top users were on Vodacom’s fixed Home Internet packages, which provide large amounts of hard-capped data and speeds from 10Mbps to 100Mbps.

The customer with the highest usage consumed 32TB in the first half of the year on a Home Internet TopUp package.

That works out to an average of roughly 5.34TB per month, over 1,403 times the average consumption.

Considering that this package is hard-capped at a significant monthly limit, this user was not shy of splurging on top-up bundles or really needed the extra data.

Assuming that they were on the fastest Home Internet LTE package with 100Mbps speeds, they would only be able to consume 2TB without buying additional bundles.

The next 3.33TB would have cost an additional R2,533 if they topped up with 17 of the best-value Home Internet 200GB bundles at R149 each.

That is nearly five times the monthly premium of R569 that they pay for the initial 2TB allocation.

In total, their consumption would cost over R3,000 per month, assuming they were on the best-value package.

The table below shows Vodacom’s top five mobile data users in the first half of 2024.

All these users consumed substantially more than MTN and Cell C’s top data users.

Both operators said their heaviest data users consumed around 1TB per month in the first half of the year.

MTN said that video streaming and social media applications contributed most to continued year-on-year growth in data traffic.

“A key factor in servicing higher demand data users is to ensure they are using newer mobile technologies and they are consuming those data services on devices meeting minimum device specifications,” the operator said.

We found it interesting that MTN customers’ top usage was lower than Vodacom’s customers, given that MTN offers several uncapped mobile data packages, which Vodacom only recently started selling again through third-party ISPs.

However, these uncapped packages — whether available through MTN itself or third-party ISPs like Axxess and Afrihost — have strict fair usage policies that limit the maximum potential usage.

For example, on MTN’s top-end best-effort Home Internet Infinite package, the maximum speed gets throttled to 2Mbps after the first 1.5TB of consumption in the month.

The operator acknowledged that the increase in data usage on its network put pressure on limited radio resources.

However, its significant investment in network resilience programmes to improve network availability and performance amid load-shedding has also supported data traffic growth.

Despite the throttling, MTN said its fixed-LTE and fixed-5G users on the MyMTN Home packages consumed up to 15 times the data of its smartphone users, which use mobile data while on the go.

Cell C said its heaviest data users were on the Home Connecta 1TB package.

“We have seen accelerated double-digit data growth in 2024 compared to the prior year driven by a robust quality network and compelling data offers for customers,” the network said.

Telkom did not provide feedback on its customers’ mobile data consumption by the time of publication.