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South Africa
5G
After the emergency Photo: Adobe Stock
5G has come to South Africa earlier than it has to most African markets. But it came via emergency spectrum only available to operators for temporary use to meet Covid-19-generated demand. Ron Murphy and Omdia’s Thecla Mbongue discuss what might happen next.
5G has reached South Africa. But who will be the early adopters?
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HY WAS TEMPORARY 5G spectrum offered to South African operators? It has made the country a global front-runner in 5G rollout but Thecla Mbongue, senior analyst with Omdia, a leading global research group, notes that 5G was not necessarily meant to happen so soon. “The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the release of spectrum,” she says. “There was a need for more capacity on the network side and in terms of efficiency that is possible by increasing the spectrum range that operators had.” The operators had been making their case for some time, but the need to increase broadband efficiency and capacity via more spectrum was clear as the lockdown started. That is not surprising. Government, like everyone else, felt the effect of the country’s lockdown. “They themselves got to experience and understand the need for increased usage of broadband for whatever reason – home working, entertainment, home shopping.” So further spectrum, which the operators had been waiting to see auctioned in due course, was issued early.
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The result was a number of operators delivering 5G connectivity well ahead of time. For instance, in the summer of 2020 MTN was able to offer 5G in a number of areas at 3.5 GHz, 2100MHz, 1800MHz, 700MHz and 28GHz. However, mass-market customers may not be an immediate target. Many operators are attempting fixed wireless access (FWA), for which 28GHz, a high frequency bandwidth offering great speeds, is ideal.
The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the release of spectrum. In fact, FWA is the entire business model point of one service provider: the mobile dataonly operator Rain. It was known as a 4G operator, but in September 2019, it launched what has been called the African continent’s first commercial 5G network. The network was a fixed-wireless 5G broadband service, offering unlimited broadband access with a downlink of up to 700Mbps. Despite the absence of dedicated
spectrum, Rain was able to deploy 5G wireless data in certain parts of Johannesburg and Tshwane in late 2019 leveraging its 4G data networking infrastructure. This use of refarmed 4G spectrum for 5G services has been applied by a number of operators around the world, sometimes alongside dedicated 5G spectrum, but often as a way to roll out 5G before dedicated spectrum is available. This approach has limitations, notably that it does not involve new spectrum. However, in South Africa, the release of temporary spectrum has overcome such challenges. Nevertheless, many operators are now using spectrum they do not actually own. The auctions are now expected to take place in March. At the end of November 2020, the temporary spectrum validity was extended from the end of November 2020 to March 2021. Until November, there was no charge for using the spectrum. However, regulator ICASA (the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa) has ruled that this extended use of spectrum will now involve a fee. What happens when the auctions take place? Mbongue says, “Rain might apply for
Communications Africa Issue 1 2021
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