LTE vs Fibre: Which One Actually Deserves Your Money

Two ways to get online in South Africa. Fibre, or LTE. Everyone selling either one will tell you theirs is better. Here's the version without the sales pitch.

Fibre

Fibre is a glass cable. It runs to your building and it doesn't care what anyone else on your street is doing. That's the whole pitch, and it happens to be true.

Speed stays where you left it. Your line doesn't get slower at 7pm just because the whole suburb got home from work. Latency sits low enough that video calls and VoIP actually work instead of sounding like a hostage negotiation.

Here's the part nobody puts on the box: load shedding doesn't kill the fibre. It kills your router. The cable outside your house has no opinion on Eskom. Your ONT and router, on the other hand, go dark the second the power does. A small UPS solves this for a few hundred rand. Skip it, and you've paid for the best connection in the country and left it plugged into nothing.

The one thing fibre can't do is show up somewhere it hasn't been laid. If your street isn't lit, fibre isn't an option you're choosing against. It's an option you don't have yet.

Current OpenServe fibre tiers and pricing live here, check before you commit: linuxweb.co.za/openserve-fibre.php

LTE

LTE runs off the mobile network. A SIM in a router, or a proper antenna bolted to your wall pointed at a tower. It has one job: get you online without anyone digging up your street.

That's the advantage. No trenching, no waiting on an installation crew, no depending on whether your area made this year's fibre rollout list. If you're in a new estate or somewhere rural, LTE isn't the backup plan. It's the plan.

The tradeoff is that you're sharing. Every tower has a ceiling, and every device near it eats into the same pool. Feels great at 6am, feels like syrup at 7pm when the whole neighbourhood logs on at once. Rain doesn't help either.

Ours is a SIM sitting in a router in the corner of your office, nothing more. That's fine for a backup line. It's not a product to build a business's primary connection on, and nobody should be sold it as one.

Current MTN and Telkom fixed LTE tiers, straight from the source: linuxweb.co.za/mtn-lte.php · linuxweb.co.za/telkom-lte.php

The actual decision

Running a business, get fibre as your main line and LTE sitting behind it as failover. That combination survives Stage 6 without costing you a trading day. Fibre alone dies with your router. LTE alone drowns every evening at peak hours.

Got fibre coverage at home. Take it. Video calls, gaming, more than one person online at a time, the gap shows up inside a week.

No fibre yet. LTE will hold you over, but treat it as a placeholder, not a plan.

We sell all three, and we'll tell you which one actually suits your address, even when it's the cheaper one. Nobody here gets a bonus for talking you into fibre you don't need.

MTN's smallest tier will run you R224 a month. Cheaper than a decent date night, and unlike a date, it commits every month without needing to be asked twice.