MyBroadband Insights has released its 2025 Mobile Voice Network Quality Report, which shows that MTN has the best voice network in South Africa.
This report is based on data collected through the most comprehensive mobile network testing project ever conducted in South Africa.
This project, which ran from 20 May 2025 to 7 July 2025, included 34,000 test calls made throughout major South African cities, towns, and roads.
MyBroadband Insights travelled more than 10,000 kilometres and tested the MTN, Vodacom, Rain, Telkom, and Cell C networks across South Africa.
Testing was performed using high-end smartphones, which support the latest network technologies, running Keysight’s advanced network testing platform, Nemo.
MyBroadband Insights tested the Call Setup Success Ratio (CSSR), Dropped Call Ratio (DCR), Call Setup Time (CST), and Speech Quality Mean Opinion Score (MOS).
These metrics form part of the latest End-user and Subscriber Charter from the industry regulator ICASA.
MTN achieved the best overall call setup success rate and the lowest dropped call ratio, which means 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 highest speech quality of 4.48.
Best voice network in South Africa
MyBroadband Insights used the globally recognised European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) specification to rank the mobile operators’ voice network quality.
The ETSI score considers all these primary metrics and more, yielding a score out of 100. The higher the score, the better the network quality.
MTN scored 77.47 to secure the top spot, with Vodacom not far behind at 75.09. Rain and Telkom tied for third place.
Cell C performed poorly in all the metrics, resulting in a score of only 34.09. This was much worse than the other South African mobile operators.
The table below provides an overview of the 2025 Mobile Voice Network Quality Report results.
| Network Operator | Call Setup Time | Speech Quality MOS | Dropped Call Ratio | Call Setup Success Ratio | Overall Score |
| MTN | 2.33s | 4.45 | 1.16% | 94.62% | 77.47 |
| Vodacom | 1.91s | 4.42 | 1.73% | 94.31% | 75.09 |
| Rain | 3.86s | 4.48 | 1.86% | 92.98% | 64.73 |
| Telkom | 3.2s | 3.87 | 3.11% | 93.31% | 64.13 |
| Cell C | 7.85s | 3.51 | 3.44% | 89.47% | 34.09 |
