Impressive Rain 5G performance following network changes

Tests of Rain’s 5G network in Pretoria and Centurion have shown an impressive performance, with download speeds exceeding 500Mbps in certain areas.

MyBroadband conducted this testing following complaints from Rain 5G subscribers about slow speeds and intermittent connectivity issues.

Many Rain 5G users took to online platforms to complain about the fact they were not getting the advertised speeds associated with their products.

Many of these users contacted MyBroadband, complaining about connection speeds dropping to around 1Mbps at times.

Many Rain 5G subscribers said despite their routers showing they had solid 4G and 5G reception, their Internet connections were down.

Last week Rain CEO Willem Roos told MyBroadband they were “acutely aware” of the complaints about their 5G network, and in particular issues experienced in the Pretoria North area.

He explained there had been a configuration error on the network which was causing the intermittent connectivity problems.

Roos told MyBroadband he was confident the problems had been resolved, however, and that most affected users would have a much better experience.

He added that their 5G network has significant capacity and it maintained average download throughput speeds “easily exceeding” 200Mbps.

MyBroadband’s Rain 5G network tests

To test these claims, MyBroadband conducted Rain 5G network performance tests in Pretoria and Centurion.

As these tests had to be conducted in multiple locations, MyBroadband built a testing kit which could be used in a car.

The kit included a Huawei 5G outdoor CPE, which was powered by a car power inverter, and both Windows and Apple laptops.

Network tests were conducted using MyBroadband’s Speed Test platform, which is hosted in Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centres to ensure an objective testing environment.

We performed network tests in 12 areas in Pretoria and Centurion where Rain has 5G coverage, including Sinovile, Hatfield, Gezina, Sunnyside, Queenswood, Clubview, and Eldoraigne.

The results were impressive. The average download speed on Rain 5G was 288Mbps, the average upload speed was 42Mbps, and the average latency was 20ms.

The peak download speed, which was achieved in Hatfield with clear line-of-site to the Rain 5G tower, was 519Mbps.

The peak upload speed of 66Mbps was recorded in Queenswood while the lowest latency across all of the tests was 10ms.

The table below provides an overview of the Rain 5G network tests which were performed on Saturday, 23 May.

Equipment speed bottleneck

An interesting observation while conducting the Rain 5G performance tests was that device capabilities can be a significant bottleneck when using the network.

The best results were, unsurprisingly, achieved when a LAN cable was used to connect the router to a laptop – as opposed to connecting via Wi-Fi.

There was an exception, however. Some of the laptops used during the tests only supported a maximum throughput of 100Mbps, even when using a LAN cable.

These restrictions resulted in peak download speeds of only 95Mbps, despite the fact that the network supported speeds of over 500Mbps.

It is therefore advisable to use different devices when testing the performance of a 5G network to ensure the speed bottleneck is not device-related.

5G test kit