South Africans pay some of the highest fees for mobile data in Africa but the country tops the list of countries with the fastest mobile internet speeds.
According to the "Global State of Mobile Networks" report by data crowd-sourcing company Open-Signal, Mzansi is well-positioned among developing countries for the download speeds available on local mobile networks.
Although nowhere near the 37.5 megabits per second (Mb/s) download connections offered by world leader South Korea, South Africa manages 9.9Mb/s across its 3G and LTE, or 4G, networks.
This placed it as No1 in Africa and ahead of countries such as Brazil and Russia on the list of 87 countries surveyed. The US provides 12.5Mb/s and Germany 13.8Mb/s.
Only four countries produced speeds of over 30Mb/s.
The number of countries generating speeds of over 20Mb/s rose from nine to 13 compared with the previous year.
The survey looked at 19billion samples from over a million people worldwide to aggregate the 3G and 4G speeds across all of a country's mobile data networks.
The second factor the report looked at was the time spent on Wi-Fi, "which translates into the proportion of time users spent connected to a Wi-Fi access point rather than a cellular network".
South Africans, the report showed, spent 37.8% of their connected time on Wi-Fi, just over half the time spent by people in the Netherlands, which led at 68%.
In cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria there were a number of programmes to provide infrastructure to deliver public Wi-Fi, but this was mostly limited to selected centres.
Of the 96 countries surveyed, 38 had time-on-Wi-Fi scores of 50% or greater, which meant that in a large part of the world people spent as much time on Wi-Fi as they did on mobile networks.
In September last year radio personalities Gareth Cliff and Tbo Touch launched a campaign called #DataMustFall to lower data costs in South Africa.
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