Technology Lesotho’s pioneering 5G network puts it ahead in Africa
Lesotho’s pioneering 5G network puts it ahead in Africa
● On the entire African continent, the fictional self-driving car in the ’80s classic series Knight Rider would be able to function only in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. That country is home to the continent’s first commercial fifth-generation, or 5G, network, central to a future of driverless Ubers, and built by Vodacom.
There is a new arms race afoot in the ICT sector with regards to the roll-out of 5G, vital to machine-to-machine 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 next year 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”, said Ruhan du Plessis, an analyst at Avior Capital Markets.
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 told Business Times.
In its interim results to end-September, 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 “... 5G will happen”.
“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 coming together to build joint infrastructure.
Operators will have to build and install more signal boosters as 5G signals operate best at short distances of only 300m and degrade at longer distances, unlike 4G which can deliver over a 15km radius.
However, mainstream 5G adoption is “still far off for SA, which still lags in 4G coverage for rural areas due to spectrum shortages”, Du Plessis said, adding that operators were more likely to invest more in 4G over the next five years.
As in other parts of the world, 5G is likely to have a gradual roll-out, starting with main centres such as Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town and moving outwards to less urbanised regions. Du Plessis said 4G was sufficient for SA at the moment since most of the population (70%) was still on 2G and 3G.
To move its customers to the more profitable 3G network, MTN launched a 3G-enabled cellphone with China Mobile this week at AfricaCom — an Africa-focused technology event in Cape Town — that will cost about R290.
Operators are looking to increase margins by moving customers from legacy 2G and 3G to 4G and eventually to 5G, said Du Plessis. Initial roll-outs would likely be in large upmarket centres such as Sandton as the rollout to the whole of Johannesburg would be costly in the initial phase.
Global estimates have 5G technology coming online as of 2019, with mainstream adoption being reached in 2025.
A connected world in which all our devices talk to each other is the promise of 5G. This “internet of things” sees the world moving towards a future of self-driving cars, smart homes and artificial intelligence.
ICT is critical to aiding SA’s economic growth. Findings from the World Bank’s “World Development Report 2016” showed that a 10-percentage-point increase in fixed broadband penetration would increase GDP growth by 1.21% in developed economies and 1.38% in developing ones.