Lesotho ahead in ICT ‘arms race’
There is a new arms race afoot in the ICT sector over the rollout of 5G, vital to machine-tomachine communication, with British-owned Vodacom seemingly in the lead with its Lesotho network.
Vodacom said it was able to launch a 5G network in Lesotho because that country's government was forthcoming with its spectrum.
SA will hold a long-delayed auction of 4G mobile spectrum by April 2019 and is expected to offer 5G licences only a year later.
The Independent Communications Authority of SA has not had a sale of spectrum in almost 15 years, though in developed economies this tends to happen annually.
Access to new spectrum is not cheap, with the developing world selling spectrum "at four to five times the price of the developed world as governments see these auctions as an opportunity to get easy cash", Avior Capital Markets analyst Ruhan du Plessis said.
Spectrum refers to the airwaves that carry signals from cellphone providers to devices.
The "millimetre waves" for 5G use higher frequencies than 3G and 4G.
The advantage here, though, is that since the spectrum has largely remained unused.
It means it is not congested and could provide much faster transfer and data speeds for South Africans.
Thus, 5G provides data speeds that are more than 100 times faster than 4G networks or LTE (Long-Term Evolution).
With those speeds, one could watch 50 movies from Netflix at a high resolution at the same time or download a full episode of Game of Thrones in less than 10 seconds.
"Vodacom has pledged to invest about R50bn in SA alone over the next five years, which includes the roll-out of 5G to create fibre-like services on mobile," CEO Shameel Joosub said. In its interim results to endSeptember, Telkom said it had spent R1.65bn on modernising its network.
Much of this has to do with its strategy to migrate its customers that are still using legacy copper technology such as ADSL to fibre and LTE offerings.
At the company's results presentation this week, CEO Sipho Maseko said: "Once the standards are set at the Mobile World Congress next year, there will be a final determination on what 5G will mean.”
According to some industry analysts, the high cost of building 5G networks might see operators building joint infrastructure.