ThobelaFM

ThobelaFM sits third among the 100 stations in South Africa with pages here, close enough to the head of the list that most people browsing the country reach it early.

The directory counts 30 opens against this stream. That is well above South Africa's median and it is the reason the station sits where it does on the country list, since the ordering is the count and nothing else.

The directory records no language for ThobelaFM. That gap is common and it is upstream of this site: broadcasters fill the field or they do not, and roughly a third of the stations with pages here have left it empty. It means the station appears on its country hub and not on any language shelf, which is the one place the omission costs it.

The gap here is large: 48 kbps where South Africa's stations typically run 128. Rates at this level were designed for dial-up and for mobile data that was billed by the megabyte, and plenty of stations simply never changed the setting.

The audio comes from playerservices.streamtheworld.com, and 9 other stations in South Africa are served from the same address. That is a streaming platform carrying many broadcasters rather than a station running its own server, which is worth knowing for a practical reason: when a platform has a bad night, a whole block of South Africa's listing stops answering at once and nothing is wrong with any of the stations in it.