Comsol is building its new consumer national 5G network without a 4G anchor, on a single unfragmented block of spectrum, and will sell every megabit of it through other companies’ brands.
The company has around 200 sites live, covering roughly a million Gauteng households. The first ISP goes live on the network in September. But how is the network put together, and how will partners, including internet service providers, banks and retailers, actually sell on it?
The network runs on 60MHz of contiguous 3.7GHz spectrum, using a single channel across the coverage footprint. Comsol makes a technical virtue of that: because the block is unfragmented, it avoids carrier aggregation, which carries cost and performance penalties on both customer premises equipment and the radio access network.
Comsol was one of five operators granted access to the band by Icasa, and holds the only exclusive national allocation among them.
Its 336MHz of contiguous millimetre-wave spectrum at 28GHz – the asset behind a 2018 pilot with Samsung on Vilakazi Street – is earmarked as a densification layer for high-demand areas later, again allocated in large blocks per channel rather than aggregated.
No 4G anchor
Comsol runs a 5G Standalone core rather than 5G bolted onto a 4G core as a non-Standalone overlay.
The practical consequences, it claims, are lower latency, higher reliability, greater device density and access to network slicing. Customer equipment does not need a 4G link to attach, and the 3.7GHz spectrum carries no legacy traffic.
Comsol says the design delivers roughly double the uplink of a typical mobile operator fixed-wireless service, which runs 5G alongside 4G.
Read: South Africa to get a new national 5G broadband network
On the radio side, Comsol has deployed 64T64R massive Mimo base stations – 64 transmit and 64 receive elements – with radio and core supporting the capability set associated with 5G-Advanced, the industry name for 3GPP Release 18 and its successor Release 19.
ZTE is the strategic vendor. Comsol says it chose the Chinese supplier after a proof-of-concept and evaluation covering 5G performance, research and development capability, C-band massive Mimo, millimetre-wave expertise and strategic fit, with the scale of resources that ZTE committed reinforcing the decision.
For transport, Comsol has deployed segment routing over IPv6, or SRv6, which it believes is likely only the second full SRv6 deployment in South Africa. The reason is specific: the company runs multiple 5G cores and needs source-based control over how traffic moves between base stations and the appropriate core.
The network also runs native dual-stack IPv4 and IPv6 rather than translation or tunnelling, which Comsol says puts it among the first South African 5G operators to do so. The argument is that it avoids protocol translation layers now and costly re-engineering as the industry moves to IPv6.
How the wholesale model works
Comsol will not sell to consumers. ISPs, mobile virtual network operators and other partners buy capacity wholesale and own everything the customer sees: pricing, packaging, billing, branding and customer acquisition.
That extends to whether services are uncapped. Comsol is not dictating product structures, and says partners define their own packages, price points and target segments, which Comsol then implements. No two partners are expected to sell the same thing.
The company says its application programming interface (API)-driven core cuts ISP onboarding from the five to six months typical of established wholesale relationships to around eight weeks, with partners getting API-level access to build and adapt products rather than working off preset templates.
Two of its commitments read as criticism of existing wholesale providers. Because Comsol has no retail arm, it says it will never prioritise its own traffic over a partner’s. And it says it will not ask a partner to stop selling in order to protect network capacity, managing congestion by adding capacity in high-demand areas instead.
Because services are not tied to a single base station, as mobile operator fixed-wireless products typically are, customers will be able to move a router between covered areas.
Physical capacity currently tops out just under 1Gbit/s, in perfect conditions. CEO Iain Stevenson said his own indoor unit runs at over 500Mbit/s unrestricted, though he does not expect every ISP to sell at that speed tier.
Where it goes next
Comsol expects to reach national coverage of millions of households by the end of 2028, expanding into the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and regional centres.
The market case rests on BMIT forecasts that fixed-wireless access will be an R82.8-billion market in South Africa by 2029, and that 5G will account for 67% of residential fixed-wireless connections by then, up from 35% in 2024. Around 15% of South African households are connected to fibre after more than a decade of roll-out, concentrated in metros where trenching costs can be recovered.
Longer term, Comsol intends to consolidate this network and the enterprise network it has run since 2016 onto a single SRv6-based backbone, and eventually move enterprise customers off proprietary radio equipment onto standards-based 5G hardware. Enterprise services would keep their SLAs, static IP addressing and Layer-2 delivery; consumer products would remain best-effort propositions. No timeline has been given. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
- Subscribe to TechCentral’s daily newsletter
- Get breaking news alerts on WhatsApp
