Vodacom 5G tested – Remarkable difference based on your phone

Vodacom launched South Africa’s first live 5G mobile network in three cities – Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town – with further rollouts planned to other parts of the country.

This network supports both mobile and fixed-wireless services and is currently available on 20 live 5G sites – 18 of which are in Gauteng, and two in Cape Town.

Vodacom’s 5G network uses the 1 x 50MHz of temporary spectrum in the 3.5GHz band which has been granted by ICASA.

Vodacom said at launch that, given enough spectrum, 5G will work at average speeds of between 150Mbps-200Mbps. Peak speeds will reach above 1Gbps.

“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.”

Vodacom said that upload speeds will initially not be as good as download speeds, and can be expected to be between 10Mbps-20Mbps – depending on coverage.

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

“This is also combined with other elements such as the lower propagation characteristics of higher frequency bands such as 3.5GHz, which don’t travel as far as lower frequencies.”

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

Testing network performance

MyBroadband tested Vodacom’s 5G performance on Tuesday 14 July using two 5G smartphones – the Huawei P40 Pro and the LG V50 ThinQ.

We tested the download speed, upload speed, and latency using MyBroadband’s speed test app in three locations – Midstream, Menlyn, and Eco-Park.

To ensure a neutral testing environment, MyBroadband’s speed test servers are hosted at NAPAfrica in Teraco’s vendor-neutral data centres.

The results showed that the device you use makes a remarkable difference in the performance which you experience.

The average download speed on the Huawei P40 Pro was nearly three-times higher than the LG V50 ThinQ.

The upload speed and latency on the Huawei phone were also much better than on the LG V50.

The tables below provide an overview of Vodacom’s 5G network speeds using the Huawei P40 Pro and the LG V50 ThinQ.

Huawei P40 Pro 5G performance on Vodacom’s network

LG V50 ThinQ 5G performance on Vodacom’s network

Huawei P40 Pro versus LG V50 ThinQ

Now read: MyBroadband tests Vodacom 5G – Unexpected results