-
Join the MyBroadband community
South Africa’s biggest forum. Discuss, discover, and connect with thousands of members.
-
Question of the Day: How impressed have you been with the 2026 Amazon Prime Day deals?
Rain roaming on Vodacom LTE
- Thread starter DTBA
- Start date
Quicks
Executive Member
It is the other way around vodacom roams on rain band 2600
Jannie said Rain roaming on Vodacom has not been finalized yet and they are still in talks.
To be honest I can't see this happening anytime soon. Vodacom has little spectrum for LTE so Rain users with their high caps will congest Vodacom LTE towers in no time.
silkenphoenixx
Senior Member
Might be implemented for Rain Mobile though, as Rain has very little coverage if they actually want to offer cellphone-style services.
Vodacom wouldn't need to offer GSM coverage though, just LTE, to the Rain roamers. If this does come to pass.
Vodacom wouldn't need to offer GSM coverage though, just LTE, to the Rain roamers. If this does come to pass.
Rain has surprisingly very good coverage actually covering most towns .
DTBA
Executive Member
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2011
- Messages
- 5,455
- Reaction score
- 847
lets see how 2018 goes !
silkenphoenixx
Senior Member
Some areas yes, but some areas it's incredibly patchy. George has about 2 Rain towers, for example. Southern Peninsula in Cape Town the coverage is very patchy. Atlantic Seaboard and City Bowl is good, but go a bit further out and you'd hardly call it reliable.
It also makes sense to try and roam on Vodacom because they have the best* coverage of any network and you'll make the best experience for your customers.
* Yeah yeah the other networks will try to contest this. It's just a fact though.
Agree with you there. Rain is also expanding it's coverage faster than the map actually shows. Richards Bay and Empangeni is fully covered by Rain yet by the looks of the coverage map only a small patch of coverage showed up in Richards Bay and nothing in Empangeni but it's covered.
What is waaaay more interesting to me is the Vodacom roaming on Rain agreement. Vodacom is plagued by spectrum limitations and they have 10MHz for their LTE and maybe an extra 5MHz is they refarm 3G spectrum which slows down 3G so their agreement with Rain is BIIIIIIIG and is waaaay bigger than mybb reported on.
Every Rain tower or close to every Rain tower runs both band 3 and band 38 and those towers also broadcasts Vodacom PLMN or their network code. So if you look at Rain's coverage map that is basically a rough coverage map of Vodacom LTE Advanced because Vodacom is allowed to use any device to roam on Rain so devices that support carrier aggregation between band 3 and 38 will have LTE-A on Vodacom where Rain's own customers won't because the 5 listed devices does not support it.
This is significant because that is probably the most extensive LTE-A network in SA and will be for the for the foreseeable future IMO.
Also even if a Vodacom customer does not have a LTE-A device but they still support band 3 which Vodacom has LTE on their own towers on what does that mean..... You can take Vodacom's LTE coverage map and overlay Rain's coverage LTE coverage map and see how densely LTE coverage is. In some cases Rain is even sharing a tower with Vodacom which means that tower is basically running 3 LTE networks for Vodacom.
Vodacom's own 1800MHz LTE
Rain's 1800MHz LTE available to use for Vodacom customers
Rain's 2600MHZ TDD LTE available to use for Vodacom customers
And then obviously Rain's carrier aggregation between those 2 bands for LTE-A. So 1 tower in 1 location essentially tripled and some of Vodacom capacity. If Vodacom really wants to be classy they can give users with the new devices 3 carrier aggregation. 1 from their network and the 2 frequencies from Rain network. I bet we will see speeds on average of 180Mbps if that ever happens.
Very interesting and IMO even if it's totally legal very uncompetitive because there is NO one that will be able to match that unless Rain also finally gets a roaming agreement to roam on Vodacom.
Such a pity their data is so damn expensive because if you want a connection almost as fast a fibre and stability you have to go with Vodacom. Roam on Rain for LTE-A and if Rain network is down you fall back to Vodacom's own LTE network. Win. Your connection will probably never be down ever unless both networks suffer downtime at the same time.
Last edited:
RAIN Mobile Beta Trial
Is there any way you can nominate fellow Mybroadband forum members onto the beta trial to test RAIN Mobile in their areas, Daiyaan ?
Is there any way you can nominate fellow Mybroadband forum members onto the beta trial to test RAIN Mobile in their areas, Daiyaan ?
Last edited:
Roaming
Good day, seems the roaming is either not happening or a state secret. A Vodacom guy says they ARE roaming on RAIN..
I have have just been moved over from iBurst/RAIN to Afrihost.
I am relocating to where RAIN shows no coverage, but Vodacom is strong.
I would love to roam... but no info forthcoming from anyone..
All help much appreciated.
Kobus
Good day, seems the roaming is either not happening or a state secret. A Vodacom guy says they ARE roaming on RAIN..
I have have just been moved over from iBurst/RAIN to Afrihost.
I am relocating to where RAIN shows no coverage, but Vodacom is strong.
I would love to roam... but no info forthcoming from anyone..
All help much appreciated.
Kobus