South Africa’s 5G networks are not particularly quick, according to a study by Ookla, the owner of internet speed check website speedtest.net.
Ookla compared webpage loading speeds for Google, YouTube and Facebook using 4G and 5G networks in South Africa, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain and the US.
“Speedtest data shows 5G delivered a much better page load speed than 4G on all three services in South Africa during the first quarter of 2024. Google loaded 22% faster on 5G than 4G, YouTube was 27% faster on 5G and Facebook was 36% faster,” Ookla said in the report, released on Monday.
Although the Ookla report focused on comparing 4G and 5G webpage loading times in each country, after crunching the numbers – see charts below – TechCentral discovered that South Africa also had the slowest 4G webpage loading times of all the countries included in the report.
TechCentral added each country’s webpage load times for Facebook, Google and YouTube from the Ookla study to get the total page load speed metric.
Canada had the lowest/best total page load times for both the 4G (3.6s) and 5G (2.9s) tests. France was the only other country to keep its position (second quickest) in both the 4G (4.2s) and 5G (3.5s) tests. The average total page load time was 5.8s for 4G and 4.3s for 5G. South Africa’s page load times were worse than the average in both cases, clocking in at 8s for 4G and 5.8s for 5G.
“Page load speed is a critical measure of your web browsing experience. It measures how long it takes for a page to load, fully displaying the content on that page. This is directly impacted by latency, which is how quickly your device gets a response after you’ve sent out a request. Your time is valuable. Our data shows that you can get some of that important time back if you have access to 5G and can afford to upgrade,” said Ookla.
