Results Of Kruger National Park Wifi, MTN And Vodacom Network Speed Testing

Free Kruger National Park wifi is only available at the Skukuza, Satara and Pretoriuskop restaurants and access can be painfully slow especially when the restaurants are full and the wifi is congested.

The only other option to connect to the web is to use the mobile/cellphone networks that provide coverage in some of the rest camps, and that unfortunately won't be free.

WifiOnSafaris has run network speed tests in most of the camps to give you an idea of what to expect in terms of upload and download speeds.

The two mobile networks (MTN, Vodacom) provide coverage to most of the rest camps in Kruger but the speed at which you can access the web using them varies widely.

So WifiOnSafaris ran tests in specific areas of each rest camp to find out how fast the connections are and came up with some interesting results...

Test Results Summary

A 3G connection with a download speed above 0.5 mbps can be considered to be good enough to browse the web, send e-mails and whatsapps etc and once you get to 2 mbps and above you can also expect to watch videos online and stream media.

A 2G edge connection is only fast enough to access e-mails and whatsapps, albeit very slowly and unreliably, and web surfing is too slow to be practical.

So looking at the results, Vodacom is the clear winner, having good average download speeds in many of the camps and slow 2G edge connection in only two, namely Tsendze and Shingwedzi.

MTN lags behind with slow 2G edge connection in Lower Sabie, Crocodile Bridge, most of Berg En Dal except the restaurant, Satara, Tsendze and Shingwedzi.

MTN is fastest in Maroela camp at 29.3 Mbps but Vodacom clocks a blazing 30.22 Mbps average download speed at Crocodile Bridge, the fastest in the entire park.

See detailed speed test results listed by camp down below.

To help achieve consistent results the same device is used for all the tests - a Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime cellphone.

With either a Mtn or Vodacom sim card installed the speed test is run by navigating with a browser to this website and then clicking the start button on the installed nPerf app on the 'Wifi Speed Test' page.

nPerf is an award winning, reliable application which has several million tests and more than 1 billion measurements done on it per year globally. The nPerf server network consists of more than 350 servers worldwide with a total bandwidth greater than 1 Tb/s.