Telecommunications

MTN beats Vodacom, Telkom, Rain, and Cell C in South Africa

Luke Fraser

 ·27 Aug 2025

MTN has the best voice network in South Africa, according to MyBroadband Insights’ 2025 Mobile Voice Network Quality Report. 

This report is based on data collected via a comprehensive mobile network testing project from 20 May to 7 July 2025, with 34,000 tests made through South African cities, towns, and roads.

MyBroadband Insights travelled over 10,000 kilometres and tested the MTN, Vodacom, Rain, Telkom and Cell C networks. 

Testing was done using high-end smartphones supporting the latest network technologies, running Keysight’s advanced network testing platform, Nemo.

MyBroadband Insights looked at the Call Setup Success Ratio (CSSR), Dropped Call Ratio (DCR), Call Setup Time (CST), and Speech Quality Mean Opinion Score (MOS).

The metrics form part of the latest End-user and Subscriber Charter from ICASA, the industry’s regulator.

MTN had the best overall call setup success rate and the lowest dropped call ratio, meaning it connected the most of its call attempts and dropped the fewest calls.

Vodacom had the fastest average call setup time of only 1.91 seconds, and Rain had the best speech quality of 4.48.

To test voice network quality, MyBroadband Insights used the globally recognised European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) specification. 

The ETSI factors in all these primary metrics and more, and yields a score out of 100. The higher the score, the better the network quality.

MTN scored 77.47 to secure the top spot, followed by Vodacom at 75.09. Rain and Telkom tied for third place at 64.73. 

Cell C was poor in all the metrics, resulting in a score of only 34.09, significantly worse than the other mobile operators.

Cell C had the longest call setup time, the worst call setup success ratio and the highest dropped call ratio.

The table below provides an overview of the 2025 Mobile Voice Network Quality Report results: