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# South Africa has a new 5G network and it’s already covering more than a million homes
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/afrihost-is-already-selling-home-internet-on-a-5g-network-built-six-months-ago/
- Published: 2026-08-21T03:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T03:29:59.000Z
- Description: Comsol owns the spectrum, the network and the core; the internet providers own the customer, the price and the complaints.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News, #big

Three uncapped internet packages appeared on Afrihost's website this week, starting at R275 a month. They run on a 5G network that did not exist six months ago, built by a company that will never sell you a connection.

Comsol has spent nearly three decades selling wireless connectivity to businesses. It is now a wholesale supplier of home broadband, and the split is absolute: Comsol owns the spectrum, the towers it leases, the network and the core, while internet providers, mobile virtual network operators and other resellers own the branding, the pricing, the billing, the support and the customer. Afrihost has listed uncapped 25Mbps at R275 a month, 75Mbps at R549, and an unrestricted package at R875 with a router included.

## How the wholesale deal actually works

Comsol charges per SIM on a subscription rather than by the gigabyte, and shapes the product around each provider. “It is not a gig-based model; it is a subscription model. We work very closely with ISPs, and we tailor the productisation for them,” chief executive Iain Stevenson told MyBroadband. “Effectively, those products are shaped within our environment, and it is their product.”

That flexibility comes from the equipment. The network runs a standalone 5G core with no 4G anchor underneath it, which Comsol says is one of only two production standalone cores live in South Africa. ZTE won a long request-for-proposal process against every major vendor and is deploying the whole thing turnkey, core and radio together, partly on the strength of its millimetre-wave road map.

## The capacity question

The network sits on 60MHz of spectrum between 3.74GHz and 3.8GHz, immediately above Rain's allocation, licensed by Icasa in 2022\. Whether a slice that size can carry mass-market home broadband once take-up builds is the untested part. Stevenson is unbothered. “There's a ton of capacity on the network,” he said, and Comsol will add base stations as saturation approaches. “That's a nice problem to have. We're looking forward to that problem.” Around 2 000 are planned nationally.

Comsol also holds 336MHz of contiguous millimetre-wave spectrum at 28GHz, bought in 2010 when nobody wanted the band, which Stevenson calls the next capacity layer.

The first provider goes live in September and Stevenson will not name it, though he says effectively all of the handful of large providers will end up on the network. Full Gauteng coverage is targeted for March 2027, with the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and major regional centres following in 2027 and 2028.