The South African telecommunications industry is in a state of flux.

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.

On the other hand, there seems to be no eLoad shedding is killing 5G in South Africand in sight to the country’s power crisis, with storm clouds gathering around the key stakeholders following the explosive allegations levelled at Eskom and the governing ANC by ousted CEO André de Ruyter.

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.

This is why power – or rather the lack of it – can ultimately be a 5G killer.

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. So, the first stage of the 5G roll-out will naturally take place in high-LSM-income, high-density urban areas. In rural areas, where communities are poorer and less densely populated, not too many customers even have the phones to use it, and the investment required will be exponentially more because of the power issues mentioned above.

Invalidated

So, not only is the power crisis causing service disruptions across the board, it’s changing the dynamics and threatening the future plans for the vendors currently committing to the 5G roll-out in the first place. After all, there are many smart people that for years have been working on the strategy of rolling out national 5G networks, and almost overnight all those calculations are invalidated because they never took into account that we’d have power issues like this.

The bottom line? The energy crisis affects the cost of deployment, which affects ROI, and if ROI isn’t right deployment can’t happen from a business perspective.

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.

The perfect storm of a power-crippled 5G roll-out will only make things worse, and widen rather than narrow that divide.

The silver lining, if there is one, is the strong wireless Internet service provider (Wisp) community that has already accounted for and mitigated against many of the power issues we’re experiencing today, and as such has a head start on any 5G deployment in South Africa’s rural and remote areas.

Wisps have several advantages over 5G mobile networks when it comes to coverage, speed, cost, reliability and flexibility of internet access delivery. Ultimately, the choice between Wisps and 5G mobile networks will depend on the specific needs and requirements of the customer or organisation. But with the power crisis potentially putting a spoke in the 5G wheel, the obvious choice for many South Africans may ultimately be made for them.

The author, Paul Colmer, is a member of the executive committee of the Wireless Access Providers’ Association, a body that represents many of South Africa’s wireless ISPs