Vodacom 5G vs Vodacom 4G – Side-by-side comparison

Vodacom recently launched its 5G mobile network in three cities – Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town.

This 5G network is available on 20 live 5G sites which are grouped into six clusters – Midrand, Sandton, Menlyn, Centurion, Waterfall/Sunninghill, and Century City.

Vodacom’s 5G network uses the 1 x 50MHz of temporary spectrum in the 3.5GHz band which was granted by ICASA. Vodacom also installed new radios to support the 5G network and new frequency band.

The good news is that its 5G network will continue to operate after this temporary spectrum is handed back after the current state of disaster.

At that point, Vodacom will roam entirely on Liquid Telecom’s 5G network. “The loss of temporary spectrum will not impact customer experience or our 5G rollout,” Vodacom said.

Vodacom added that the performance of its 4G network will not be impacted by the launch of its 5G network, as no 4G spectrum was re-farmed.

The company said that, given enough spectrum, 5G will work at average speeds of between 150Mbps and 200Mbps.

“The speeds and latency will be determined by the coverage at the user’s location and the load on the network at a given point in time,” said Vodacom.

“Other factors that need to be taken into consideration include how far away you are from a mast, which spectrum is being used, and how many people around you are using 5G.”

Latency and transmission

Vodacom said upload speeds through 5G will initially not be as good as download speeds, and can be expected to be between 10Mbps and 20Mbps.

This is because a smartphone has lower transmission power to communicate back to a base station relative to a base station communicating to the customer device.

This is combined with other elements such as the lower propagation characteristics of higher frequency bands such as 3.5GHz.

Uplink performance will improve as newer devices support capabilities such as uplink and downlink decoupling, it said.

Vodacom added that 5G latency is influenced by how far away a site is from its core network, and distance from a speed test server.

“At the moment, 5G latencies will be very similar to 4G until new elements such as mobile edge computing and new capabilities like network slicing are introduced,” Vodacom said.

5G versus 4G performance

To compare Vodacom’s 5G and 4G networks, MyBroadband used two LG V50 ThinQ 5G smartphones – the only 5G phone currently available in South Africa.

Multiple speed tests were performed on Vodacom’s 5G and 4G networks at three locations – Menlyn, Eco Park, and Midstream.

The tests were performed at the same location and at the same time to ensure a like-for-like comparison.

All the locations were close to the 5G/4G tower with a clear line of sight, which means the results reflect near perfect conditions.

It showed that Vodacom 5G easily outperformed 4G on download speed – but this was not the case with upload speed and latency, however.

The average 4G upload speed was nearly triple that of the 5G network, while 4G latency was lower than 5G latency.

The tables below provide an overview of the performance of Vodacom’s 5G and 4G networks.

Menlyn

Eco Park

Midstream

Now read: MyBroadband tests Vodacom 5G – Unexpected results

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