The South African telecoms business is changing.
On the one hand, 5G network deployments are accelerating, with the recent announcement that Nokia has won a big contract to expand MTN’s 5G network to over 2 800 more locations across the nation.
On the other hand, there appears to be no end in sight to South Africa’s power crisis, with storm clouds forming over key parties following the bombshell claims levelled at Eskom and the ruling ANC by dismissed CEO André de Ruyter.
While 5G offers numerous benefits to users, such as faster download speeds, lower latency, and higher network capacity, it also has certain drawbacks, the most prominent of which is increased power consumption. One of the benefits of 5G is that it is more “eco-friendly” than LTE. Nevertheless, while 5G needs less power per bit of data, because it transmits substantially more data than LTE, the net consequence is that it consumes significantly more power.
While 5G will not use millimetre-wave bands in South Africa since the spectrum has not been made available to local operators, it will consume more power to transmit signals in the available sub-6GHz bandwidth.
This is why electricity – or rather, a lack of it – has the potential to be a 5G killer.
Like with fibre and LTE, 5G deployment began in affluent places since it requires a large upfront expenditure and a measurable return on investment to be feasible. As a result, the initial stage of 5G deployment will naturally occur in high-LSM-income, high-density metropolitan locations. In rural locations, where communities are poorer and less densely populated, few consumers have phones to utilise it, and the investment required will be tenfold higher due to the aforementioned power difficulties.
Thus, not only is the power outage disrupting services across the board, but it is also altering the dynamics and jeopardising the future plans of the suppliers who are presently committed to the 5G roll-out in the first place. For all, many clever people have been working for years on the strategy of building out national 5G networks, and virtually overnight all of their calculations are invalidated because they never considered that we’d have power concerns like this.
What’s the bottom line? The energy crisis impacts deployment costs, which affect ROI, and if ROI isn’t correct, deployment can’t happen from a business standpoint.
The longer the power outage lasts, the more it would alter our expectations of how things will progress in terms of growing and increasing 5G network coverage and connecting people. Everyone is discussing how to bridge the digital gap. The issue has never been a lack of Internet access; rather, it has been a shortage of inexpensive Internet access.
The perfect storm of a power-crippled 5G rollout would further exacerbate the situation, widening rather than narrowing the disparity.
If there is a silver lining, it is the robust wireless Internet service provider (Wisp) community, which has already accounted for and mitigated against many of the power challenges we are currently facing, and hence has a head start on any 5G implementation in South Africa’s rural and remote locations.
When it comes to coverage, speed, affordability, dependability, and flexibility of internet access distribution, wisps have significant benefits over 5G mobile networks. Finally, the decision between Wisps and 5G mobile networks will be determined by the customer’s or organization’s individual demands and expectations. Yet, with the power issue potentially squeezing the 5G wheel, the obvious option for many South Africans may be decided for them.