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MTN is the only South African mobile operator to receive recognition in Opensignal’s latest Mobile Network Experience Global Awards.
The awards are Opensignal’s annual assessment of real-world experience across national mobile networks worldwide. The data used to determine the ratings is based on billions of measurements taken directly from user devices during the latter half of 2025.
“Opensignal’s awards … recognise the operators that deliver the highest standards of performance and innovation,” said Shawn Heidel, president for network experience at Opensignal.
MTN South Africa was named as a rising star in the Download Speed Experience, Upload Speed Experience and Video Experience categories, placing it among other rising stars including Malaysia’s U Mobile, Ecuador’s Movistar and India’s BSNL. MTN improved its download and upload speed by 23.8Mbit/s and 3.6Mbit/s, respectively. It’s video quality rating improved by 14 points.
The next level of recognition up from Rising Star is “Global Leader”, where Australia’s Optus and Vodafone, Canada’s Telus and Rogers, and India’s Jio featured prominently in multiple categories. The third, and highest, level of recognition for each category is “Global Winner”. The global winners for the categories MTN has been recognised in are Finland’s DNA for Upload Speed Experience, Norway’s Telenor for Video Experience and the US’s T-Mobile for Download Speed Experience.
Capital spending
Kenya’s Safaricom is the only other African operator in the “large land area” category to garner recognition, also receiving Rising Star status in the Games Experience and Voice App Experience categories. Japanese company au was the overall winner among countries with a large land area, while South Korea’s SK Telecom topped out among countries with a small land area. Opensignal said the distinction is important because operators in markets of different sizes “face fundamentally different challenges”.
“Rolling out service across vast, varied geographies is not the same as deploying networks in compact countries with dense populations and high-rise urban environments. By applying this split, we ensure operators are compared on a like-for-like basis, avoiding bias that would otherwise favour smaller, more geographically concentrated markets,” said Opensignal.
Read: Vodacom, MTN and Telkom battle over network supremacy
MTN’s dominance in South Africa in network performance surveys over the last five years has coincided with a ramp-up in capital spending that began in 2020. Although rival Vodacom’s capex has been consistently higher than MTN’s over the same period, it had been slowing since 2022, only to tick up slightly once again in 2025. Telkom’s capital spending, in contrast, has been slowly declining as part of a “smart capex” deployment strategy aimed at lowering costs while maximising infrastructure spend.
Speaking to TechCentral in a May 2025 interview, former MTN South Africa CEO Charles Molapisi – who has been replaced in the role by Ferdi Moolman – said MTN has injected about R95-billion into its network over the last decade. The operator’s strategy is to now cut back on capital spending as it focuses on monetising its assets.
“We pretty much have a solid 4G network and our 5G population coverage is above 44%, so we are now well positioned in terms of the capacity we have to monetise the network. So, our focus now is how we can best use it,” said Molapisi. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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