Connectivity
How does microwave internet compare to fibre or SIM card internet?
All three get you online, but they solve different problems, and the right choice usually comes down to timeline, budget, and how much redundancy you actually need.
Fibre: The Long-Term Best Performer
Fibre wins on raw performance: symmetrical upload and download speeds, extremely low latency, and effectively unlimited capacity for future growth. Its weakness is deployment time, trenching and municipal approvals can take weeks to months, and it's not available everywhere yet, particularly outside major metros and business parks.
Microwave: Fast to Deploy, Weather-Dependent
Microwave splits the difference. Installation is measured in days once line of sight is confirmed, and licensed microwave delivers performance close to fibre for most business applications. The trade-off is a dependency on unobstructed line of sight and, in heavy rain or storm conditions, some signal degradation on certain frequency bands, though modern licensed links are engineered to handle South African rainfall patterns with minimal practical impact for most business use cases.
SIM Card Internet: Fastest to Activate, More Variable
SIM-based LTE/5G internet is the fastest of the three to get running, often online within hours since it just needs a compatible router and an active data SIM. It's inherently mobile and requires no site survey. The trade-off is that performance depends on mobile tower congestion and distance, meaning speeds can vary by time of day and location in ways fibre and microwave generally don't.
A Practical Comparison
| Factor | Fibre | Microwave | SIM/LTE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment time | Weeks-months | Days | Hours |
| Typical speed ceiling | Very high | High | Variable |
| Main dependency | Civil infrastructure | Line of sight | Tower coverage |
| Best used as | Primary link | Primary or resilience | Backup or mobile |
The Resilience Answer
The strongest setup for most businesses isn't choosing one, it's combining two with automatic failover. Fibre as primary with SIM-based LTE failover is our most common configuration; larger sites sometimes run fibre and microwave on genuinely independent paths (different physical routes, different providers) so a single dig-up or tower fault can't take the whole business offline.
Our Recommendation Approach
We don't sell you the connectivity type we happen to have stock of, we assess your site, your uptime requirements, and your budget, then recommend the mix that actually fits. For a business that can tolerate brief interruptions, single fibre may be enough. For a business running VoIP, cloud applications and card payments, redundant connectivity isn't a luxury, it's operational insurance.