An unpopular opinion from an ISP: most of the people who ask us to upgrade their fibre line do not need a faster line. They need something else fixed, and upgrading quietly adds a few hundred rand a month without changing the thing that was annoying them.
We would rather tell you that up front than take the upgrade.
Find out whether the line is even the problem
Plug a laptop directly into the router with a network cable, turn the Wi-Fi off on that laptop, and run a speed test. Use a South African test server.
If that cabled result is roughly what you pay for, your line is fine. Whatever is frustrating you is happening somewhere between the router and your desk, and a bigger line will not touch it. If the cabled result is well under what you pay for, then it is worth a support call — that is a genuine fault, not a capacity problem.
The three usual culprits
The router
This is the most common one by a distance. Plenty of businesses are running a router that was handed over when the line was installed years ago. It may only do 2.4GHz, or an older Wi-Fi standard, or it simply falls over once thirty devices are connected. The line behind it can be 200Mbps and it will still feel slow, because the bottleneck is the box, not the fibre.
Where it sits matters as much as what it is. Routers end up in cupboards, behind monitors, under desks and on the floor, all of which are the worst places for them. Height and clear air do more for Wi-Fi than most equipment upgrades.
One device eating everything
A single machine can flatten a shared line. A PC pulling a large Windows update, a camera system uploading footage to the cloud all day, or a cloud backup that was configured to run continuously rather than overnight. It looks like the internet is slow for everyone, and in a sense it is, but the fix is scheduling rather than capacity.
Wi-Fi, not fibre
Speed at the router and speed at your desk are two completely different numbers. Walls, distance, other networks nearby and old devices all take their cut. In a double-storey house or an office with brick interior walls, you can lose most of your speed between the router and the far end of the building while the line itself is running perfectly.
When an upgrade genuinely is the answer
Sometimes it is. If you have many people on video calls simultaneously, if you are pushing large files or backups upstream during working hours, or if your cabled test comes back saturated during your busiest period, more line is the correct answer. Pay particular attention to the upload figure — that is what hurts on video calls and cloud backups, and it is usually the number people overlook when comparing packages.
The point is not that upgrades are never worth it. The point is to establish which of these you actually have before committing to a higher monthly bill indefinitely.
If you would rather not work through it yourself, send us your speed test result and we will tell you which one it is. It is usually a five minute answer.