Fixed wireless home broadband is an ever growing segment of the market, offering internet in markets where fibre-to-the-home isn’t yet available of prohibitively expensive. MTN South Africa has announced that it will offer uncapped 5G packages at R999 p/m, upgrading its current LTE plans.
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MTN has effectively upgraded the same plan to a higher speed, making it more competitive with other offerings in the market. That being said, the MTN 5G packages only be applicable in areas where 5G coverage exists. Being simply an upgrade of existing plan means that it has the same restrictions – it is limited to 50Gbps speeds and includes a 1TB fair-usage policy. This means that once the user hits 1TB of data use in the month, speeds will be significantly reduced.
For an extra R100 p/m this fair-use policy can be doubled, meaning users will have 2TB of data at 100Mbps for R1,099 p/m before the fair usage policy kicks in. Once fair usage kicks in, speeds are reduced to 4Mbps for the rest of the month. Both deals are available on a 24 month contract that includes a 5G router, or an on month-on-month basis if the user has their own 5G router.
“MTN has developed the MyMTN Home Uncapped 5G plans using the latest 5G network technologies to provide unlimited data connectivity to customers’ homes across 125 coverage areas, across all provinces,” the company said. These coverage areas are expected to expand in months to come.
In comparison, mobile operator Rain offers a 50Mbps “unlimited home 5G standard” package for R699 p/m, which has a similar fair usage policy as the MTN package. It then offers an “unlimited home 5G premium” package, which doesn’t have any speed restrictions after a set data limit, which costs R999 p/m.
