Cell C’s 5G network is live and is available to customers today.

CEO Jorge Mendes disclosed this in an interview with TechCentral on Friday, and only in response to a direct question. “I’m telling you this because you’re asking me the question,” he said. “Otherwise, strategically, we’ll launch it with propositions.”

Any Cell C customer with a 5G handset standing in a 5G coverage area is already getting 5G, Mendes confirmed. There has been no launch event and no mention of it in the company’s maiden full-year results, published earlier on Friday.

More striking is the coverage claim: because Cell C runs on roaming agreements with both of South Africa’s largest mobile operators rather than building its own radio network, it reaches the 5G sites of both.

“We’ve technically got the widest 5G coverage in the country at the moment,” Mendes said. “We’ve got all of Vodacom’s 5G sites, and we’ve got all of MTN’s 5G sites, both on their 2.6GHz and 3.5GHz [spectrum bands].”

Getting there took work on both sides. The host operators had to release capital expenditure to enable the access, Mendes explained, while Cell C had to prepare its own core network. That work is now complete.

What is not complete is the commercial proposition, which is why Cell C hasn’t yet shouted about its 5G coverage from the rooftops.

‘Quite unique’

“5G is 5G. It does nothing more than what you already had,” Mendes said. “Your YouTube video is going to play the same way it did on 4G.” At consumer level, he argued, wide 5G coverage on its own is not a proposition. Cell C wants to launch with something “quite unique” and is waiting for the right moment.

That is a markedly different posture from the rest of the industry, which spent several years marketing 5G coverage as an end in itself.

Read: MVNOs are doing the heavy lifting at Cell C

Mendes identified fixed-wireless access as the obvious opportunity but said the commercial structures behind an FWA proposition are not yet built.

Asked about Comsol’s announcement this week that it was launching a national 5G consumer broadband network, Mendes called it validation of Cell C’s wholesale model and complementary rather than competitive.

He also confirmed Cell C is in discussions with Starlink and Amazon, both as coverage partners and potentially to resell their services to retail customers.

Alongside the 5G switch-on, Cell C is migrating customers to voice-over-LTE, also known as VoLTE, a high-quality voice-over-data calling technology. Roughly a million customers have moved already, with about three million more to follow in the coming months.

Read: Blu Label’s earnings just fell off a cliff – on paper

Cell C has rebuilt itself around not owning infrastructure, roaming on Vodacom and MTN across some 28 000 sites rather than running the 5 500 it once did, and renting its platform to banks and retailers through a wholesale model.