The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown have put strain on telcos due to increased data demand from subscribers.<\/p>\n
With many people working from home and relying on the Internet for their entertainment, Internet providers have seen a big increase in data usage.<\/p>\n
The mobile operators have been particularly hard-hit, as they rely on licensed spectrum to offer data services.<\/p>\n
To address the spectrum constraints, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) licensed temporary spectrum to mobile operators in April.<\/p>\n
Five spectrum bands were made available for temporary assignment: 700MHz, 800MHz, 2,300MHz, 2,600MHz, and 3,500MHz.<\/p>\n
The spectrum is available to operators for the duration of the national state of disaster to ensure operators maintain the quality and meet the demand of broadband services.<\/p>\n
Telkom is one of the companies which received spectrum, and to see what the impact was on network performance MyBroadband assessed its average speeds.<\/p>\n
Telkom started to roll out the additional spectrum in June, and to assess the performance difference MyBroadband looked at two data sets:<\/p>\n
The difference in performance from these two data sets was significant, with all major indicators showing improvement.<\/p>\n
The average download speed increased from 20.5Mbps to 23.8Mbps and the average upload speed increased from 5.0Mbps to 7.2Mbps.<\/p>\n
The biggest change was in latency, which decreased from 44ms to 29ms after the additional spectrum was deployed.<\/p>\n
The spectrum issued by ICASA therefore served its purpose of improving network quality to meet subscribers’ additional demand and ensured network stability during the lockdown.<\/p>\n