Eskom load-shedding is killing 5G in South Africa
Although 5G is more power efficient, cellular towers using the technology consume more electricity than LTE because it supports much higher speeds.
“One of the selling points of 5G is that it’s more ‘eco-friendly’ than LTE,” said Wireless Access Provider’s Association executive committee member Paul Colmer.
“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,” Colmer said.
“This is why power — or rather the lack of it — can ultimately be a 5G killer.”
Colmer said there seems to be no end in sight to the country’s power crisis, with storm clouds gathering following explosive allegations levelled at Eskom and the governing ANC by ousted CEO André De Ruyter.
Vodacom and MTN have revealed that they’ve spent billions on batteries. According to Vodacom, it has spent at least a billion per year.
MTN has said that diesel costs them billions.
During stage 5 and stage 6 power cuts, MTN says it goes through 450,000 litres of fuel per month.
Rain currently operates the 5G network with the greatest coverage in South Africa, and Telkom launched its 5G network in 2022.
“There are many smart people that for years have been working on the strategy of rolling out national 5G networks,” he said.
“Almost overnight, all those calculations are invalidated because they never took into account that we’d have power issues like this.”
Colmer explained that, as with fibre and LTE, 5G rollouts started in wealthier areas.
This is because it entails a significant upfront investment and needs a measurable return on investment (ROI) to make it viable.
He explained that rural areas communities are poorer and less densely populated, and not too many customers even have 5G-capable phones.
“The investment required will be exponentially more because of the power issues I mentioned above,” stated Colmer.
“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 rollout in the first place.”
The bottom line, Colmer said, is load-shedding affects the cost of deployment, which affects ROI.
And if ROI isn’t right, deployment can’t happen from a business perspective.
“Everyone is talking about bridging the digital divide,” said Colmer.
“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 rollout will only make things worse, and widen rather than narrow that divide.”
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