Opinion | Load shedding is killing 5G in South Africa, writes Wapa's Paul Colmer
On one hand, 5G network roll-outs are gathering pace, with the latest news that Nokia has won a major deal to expand MTN’s 5G network to more than 2 800 additional sites around the country.
While 5G promises to bring many benefits to consumers, including faster download speeds, lower latency and better network capacity, it also comes with some challenges, one of the most significant being increased power consumption. One of the selling points of 5G is that it’s more “eco-friendly” than LTE, but even though 5G consumes less power per bit of data, because it transmits significantly more data than LTE the net result is also significantly higher power consumption.
While 5G in South Africa won’t be using millimetre-wave bands because the spectrum has not been made available to local operators, it will still be using more power to transmit signals in the available sub-6GHz spectrum.As with fibre and LTE, 5G roll-out started in the wealthier areas, because it entails a big upfront investment and needs measurable return on investment to make it viable.
The longer the power crisis continues, the more it will change the way we thought things would happen, development wise, on expanding and improving 5G network coverage and getting people connected. Everyone is talking about bridging the digital divide. The problem has never been the lack of Internet access, but rather the lack of affordable Internet access.
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