The arrival of 5.5G – or 5G advanced, promising download speeds of up to 10Gbps and upload speeds of up to 1Gbps, is some way off in the South African market, largely due to a lack of available spectrum and the infrastructure changes required to enable it. However, Comsol is laying the groundwork to offer 5.5G services as early as next year.
This is according to Mauritz Lewies, Chief Technical Officer at Comsol, who says: “To achieve the target values for 5.5G, you need at least 240MHz of spectrum. This is a tall order for most entities in South Africa.”
He says there are two key challenges for MNOs on the road to 5.5G: they need to secure more spectrum, and they must upgrade their hardware.
“They don't have enough spectrum in the higher frequency bands. They do have a lot of spectrum in the lower bands, but those are currently being used for 3G and 4G, and so there's a lot of re-farming happening in that space,” he says. “Spectrum farming might allow them to increase their current speeds, but not to the extent that 5G advanced is promising the industry. With a multi-cc approach, multiple carriers combined could achieve these speeds and a big component of that is millimetre-wave (mmWave).”
In terms of hardware and infrastructure, he says: “One advantage of 5G over 4G is a big shift that occurred within the context of massive multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) technology to drive capacities. Now with the advent of 5.5G, there's a new evolution of that – extra large antenna arrays (ELLA), which would allow operators to run more multiple concurrent channels within one antenna array and make better use of massive MIMO.
“Comsol is already ahead of the MNOs as we already have the necessary spectrum assets, and we can already achieve true 5.5G with one gig uplinks and 10 gig downlinks. Our market is different from that of the MNOs, with different requirements. For example, from an enterprise perspective, it's very important to be able to provide high uplink capacities. We're currently working to achieve that 5.5G goal,” he says.
“We're starting with the initial roll-out of our 5.5G capable sub-6GHz infrastructure: this will be the coverage driver to make sure that we get connectivity everywhere. Following this, we will overlay it with the mmWave capacity driver layer as soon as there's justification for it, to enable a seamless transition from a network perspective. However, we will launch it commercially only once it makes sense in terms of providing a customer base with a cost-effective service. This may be towards the end of 2025.”
Comsol is South Africa’s leading provider of specialised licensed wireless connectivity, with over 27 years of experience focused exclusively on business connectivity. As the owner of the largest contiguous tranche of 28GHz spectrum in the country, along with 60MHz of 3.7GHz spectrum, Comsol delivers reliable, high-performance connectivity backed by unmatched expertise. Its solutions serve a diverse range of industries, connecting everything from enterprises and small businesses to autonomous mining equipment and industrial machines, across a nationwide network that spans more than 200 metros.
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