The South African branch of Starbucks will soon be providing 1Gbps (gigabit) internet to all its stores in the country, thanks to a recently-announced partnership with BitCo Telecoms.

To put that into perspective, the average internet speed in South Africa – according to a 2017 report by Akamai Technologies – is 6.7Mbps. As 1Gbps is equal to 1000Mbps, you can see the massive difference in speed here.

If that’s got you excited to go out and buy some coffee just to browse at those higher speeds, you can do so right now, depending on where you live.

The Starbucks branches in Melrose Arch and The Marc already have the new, faster connection. The rest of the branches will apparently be receiving their gigabit connections “in months to come”.

The press release we received notes that this is a first for Starbucks, not just in South Africa, but globally.

Given that many people go to these stores to sit on their PCs and tablets anyway, this is a clever move for both parties and we’re always happy to see faster internet locally.

We’ll be visiting the Melrose Arch branch soon and reporting on what speeds we see there.

Just because the store actually has a gigabit connection doesn’t mean that full speed will be available to all customers. The amount of people in the store and their traffic will also affect this, but we have to imagine that it will be suitably speedy regardless.