Wi-Fi 6E useless in South Africa without more spectrum
The Wireless Access Providers Association (Wapa) has called on the South African government to exempt 1,200MHz of radio frequency spectrum from licencing to improve Wi-Fi networks in South Africa.
Wapa and the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance (DSA) collaborated on a study in South Africa over several months to determine the potential benefits of unlicensed spectrum use in the 6GHz band in terms of service quality, coverage, and affordability.
They found that enabling unlicensed use of the spectrum could unlock $57.76 billion (R929.69 billion) in the economy over the next ten years.
That consists of an estimated $34.81 billion in GDP contribution, $13.32 billion in producer surplus to South African businesses, and $9.63 billion in consumer surplus.
“Three further studies were simultaneously conducted by DSA and its partners for Nigeria, Kenya and Indonesia, all with similar findings,” Wapa said.
According to DSA president Martha Suarez, the spectrum could play a crucial role in bridging the digital divide and enabling improved access to remote education, work and commerce.
The DSA is also sharing its spectrum expertise in the Digital Access Programme in the UK.
The new spectrum that Wapa and DSA suggest should also be unlicensed in South Africa is in the band used by Wi-Fi 6E — the latest generation of Wi-Fi technology.
WiFi 6E is short for Wi-Fi 6 extended, a standard that provides numerous 160MHz channels. It offers the fastest Wi-Fi available with multi-gigabit, low latency connections — good for supporting 5G services.
While there are already numerous Wi-Fi 6E capable devices and routers on the South African market, they cannot make use of the spectrum.
Instead, they are stuck with the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands currently available.
Paul Colmer, WAPA Executive Management Committee member
The 6GHz band is broken into two main portions — the lower band between 5,925MHz to 6,425MHz and the upper band from 6,425MHz up to 7,125 MHz.
The DSA has urged governments to provide unlicensed access to the lower band and 700MHz of the upper band.
Wapa executive Paul Colmer said that opening up 1,200MHz of unlicensed spectrum would be “phenomenal” compared to the spectrum available in South Africa right now.
While the recent high demand IMT spectrum auction saw a further 306MHz released in the 5GHz band, Wisps are stuck with using sub-6GHz spectrum.
Colmer said the current Wi-Fi 5 spectrum was heavily congested because many devices were vying for the same frequency band. That causes interference and limits effective ranges.
“New spectrum offloads some of that traffic, so not only is it not interfering by using a different frequency band, there is less congestion on the old band,” Colmer said. “That makes it more reliable, faster, and more effective.”
Colmer added newer equipment and methods are more spectrally efficient, which would extend the usefulness of the bandwidth even further.
The Federal Communications Commission in the US opened up 1,200MHz in the 6GHz band for unlicensed use back in April 2020, while the EU released 480MHz in the band in June 2021.
Loading ...