Rain’s mobile roaming deal with Vodacom — and eSIM plans

Rain has confirmed industry speculation that it has signed a roaming deal with Vodacom to launch a national 4G mobile network with voice services.
Responding to questions from MyBroadband, Rain emphasised that it is building its own network infrastructure and is using Vodacom to handle “coverage gaps”.
It also said that eSIM support is on its product development roadmap and plans to offer it soon.
These answers come after Rain announced the launch of a fully-fledged 4G mobile network on Thursday night.
It also completely overhauled its product range, replacing its separate packages for uncapped 5G fixed-wireless access, and data-only 4G services, with a single product called Rain One.
A starter-level Rain One package includes unlimited 5G home Wi-Fi, and 4G services for two mobile phones for R559 monthly, on a month-to-month basis.
At this level, the 5G service is limited to download speeds of 30Mbps.
Subscribers can speed up the service for an extra R200 per “speed level”. The second level increases download speeds to 60Mbps, and the third level unlocks speeds to over 100Mbps.
The 4G SIMs include 60 voice minutes, 100 SMS messages, and 2GB of data. These can also be “levelled up” for R75 per level.
Calls on Rain’s network rely on voice over LTE technology. Rain offers an Android app for devices without VoLTE.
MyBroadband found that Rain is not yet listed on Apple’s website as a supported carrier for iPhones.
The website breaks down specific iPhone features available on South African networks, such as 5G, visual voicemail, personal hotspots, and Wi-Fi calling.
Rain did not provide a list of features it will support in response to our questions but did confirm that all 4G-capable Apple devices are supported on its network.
“However, only iPhone 6 Plus onwards supports VoLTE for voice calling. All that is required from customers are to enable their ‘VoLTE’ setting,” Rain stated.
Vodacom roaming deal
Regarding its roaming agreement, Rain first reiterated that it had acquired wireless network capacity in the form of radio frequency spectrum at auction last year.
Rain said this has allowed it to overlay its existing 4G network with a new layer.
“Last year, we participated in the spectrum auction with the specific goal of acquiring sub–1GHz spectrum, which will allow us to establish a national coverage layer,” Rain said.
“We successfully obtained 20 Mhz of 700 MHz spectrum, which we are now using to roll out our 700 MHz network on top of our existing network.”
However, in some areas of the country, Rain said its network deployment had been held up due to delays in switching off South Africa’s ancient analogue TV network.
“To address these coverage gaps, we have entered into a roaming agreement with Vodacom,” said Rain.
“This enables us to provide coverage in these areas where our network is yet to be deployed.”