📡 Are You Paying Too Much for Home Internet?

Hi there!

A developer called Max Blade is vibecoding a video game live on YouTube, and his viewers are the product team. They type fixes and ideas into the chat, and 25 AI agents build the best feature updates overnight.

He calls it hivecoding. Check back a day later, and the game's noticeably better.

Back in the real world, none of that works without a decent connection. So we compared what home internet is actually worth buying, with fibre or without.

We also look at:

Hit reply and tell us what runs your home internet. Fibre, 5G, AirFibre or something else entirely, we want to know.

Justin, Kobus and Rowen

Got fibre in your street? Then the choice is mostly made for you, and it's cheaper than it used to be. No fibre? You've got more options than ever, and the price gap has closed.

Fibre prices have dropped. Afrihost's 30/30Mbps line now costs R517 on Vumatel, while five years ago R697 got you 20/10Mbps on the same network. On Openserve, the same 30/30Mbps line is R497 a month. If you only need the basics, a 20/10Mbps line on Openserve Web Connect starts at R367 a month.

There are three real options, and all of them come down to signal at your exact address.

Rain doesn't advertise a speed for its top plan, but MyBroadband's speed test measured a peak of 652Mbps on it this year. There's no fair-usage cap, and it comes with two Wi-Fi extenders.

MTN AirFibre isn't fibre at all. It's fixed wireless: an antenna on your roof points at the nearest MTN tower. It has no fair-usage cap, and the router and antenna are free to use. It's the closest wireless gets to fibre.

Fixed-5G plans from Axxess start cheap, but the small ones cap your speed once you pass the allowance. The R379 plan drops to 2Mbps after 150GB, and it only lasts until 1TB on the R999 plan. That's fine for light use. If your house streams every night, look at the bigger plans or the no-cap options.

Look at Herotel. It has more than 2,000 towers and runs fibre and wireless well beyond the big metros. Until 30 November, new fibre customers get 120Mbps for R499 a month, down from R799, or 200Mbps for R699, down from R1,049. That price is locked until 30 June 2027. Prefer prepaid? Its R199 Flex starter currently covers a full 31 days.

Check coverage at your address, not your suburb. Rain, MTN, Vodacom and Telkom all have coverage maps, and fixed wireless lives or dies on which tower can see your house.

Still not an option. It isn't licensed in South Africa, and the regulator has said it won't be without a law change.

MONEY Amazon's Black Friday has already started. Amazon SA's early Black Friday sale opened on 21 October, more than five weeks before Black Friday itself. It has up to 50% off electronics, and Prime members got 24 hours' early access. Signal: Long sales bring fake shop sites, so type the retailer's address yourself rather than tapping links in messages.

SAFE AND SOUND Delivery robots accused of scanning faces. Two class actions in the US claim that delivery robots scanned customers' faces and hands without consent. Both companies deny it. Signal: Cameras on wheels raise the same question as cameras on walls: who sees the footage, and for how long?

WORK AND PLAY Spotify launches paid podcast memberships. Podcasters can now charge fans on Spotify for ad-free listening, early access and bonus episodes, keeping 90% of the money. It's live in 34 markets, though not in South Africa yet. Signal: When it lands here, expect some of your favourite shows to move their bonus episodes behind a members-only tier.

COMFORT A pool robot that hunts leaves. The Wybot S2 Vision cleaned well in testing, but its basket needs emptying every two hours, and it needs a three-hour charge every four hours. It usually lists at R20,000. Signal: It saves you the scrubbing, not the supervising, so wait for a deal; it's been seen at R15,000.

WORK AND PLAY The next Xbox could cost R30,000. Microsoft's next console, Project Helix, is reportedly due by Christmas 2028 at up to $1,800. That's roughly R30,000 at today's exchange rate. Signal: There's no rush to replace your console; the next one is two years out and won't be cheap.

A frozen router is usually fixed by switching it off and on again. This does it for you, even when you're away. The trick is a plug that turns itself back on: once the router is off, there's no Wi-Fi left to send it the "on" command.

You need Home Assistant running at home and a smart plug with a built-in auto-on timer, such as a Shelly Plug S Gen3. About 20 minutes.

01 Plug your router into the Shelly and add the Shelly to Home Assistant. In the Shelly app, open the plug's Timer tab, tick Auto on, enter 30 seconds and tap Save. From now on, whenever the plug switches off, it switches itself back on 30 seconds later, Wi-Fi or not.

02 In Home Assistant, go to Settings > Devices & services > Add Integration, choose Ping (ICMP) and enter 1.1.1.1 as the host. It checks every 30 seconds and gives you a sensor that shows Connected or Disconnected.

03 Go to Settings > Automations & scenes > Create automation. Add a trigger: Entity > State, pick the ping sensor, set To to Disconnected and For to 5 minutes.

04 Add two actions: Switch: Turn off on the Shelly plug, then a Delay of 10 minutes. The delay stops it rebooting the router over and over while your ISP has a real outage. Save the automation.

05 Test it: unplug the cable between your fibre box and router for 5 minutes. The router should switch off, come back 30 seconds later and reconnect once you plug the cable back in.

AI Expo Africa · 28–29 October · Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg. Africa's biggest AI and smart automation trade show.

Africa Tech Festival · 17–19 November · CTICC, Cape Town. The continent's big telecoms show, with a free expo.

rAge Expo · 27–29 November · Johannesburg. Gaming, gadgets and South Africa's biggest LAN party.

The biggest saving is R320 off the Mecer UPS, which keeps your router and fibre box running in a power cut. You can get R300 off the Huawei AX2 at HiFi Corp if you’re a +more member before 11 November.