A new 5G network built specifically for home internet is being deployed across Gauteng, and the first internet service provider selling on it goes live in September.
Households will not buy from the operator. Comsol Networks, a Midrand company that has spent nearly 30 years selling connectivity to businesses, will sell wholesale access only. Internet service providers, mobile virtual network operators and other resellers will set their own prices, packages and branding, and will own the customer relationship.
The move follows a multibillion-rand funding round and a shareholder overhaul announced on Thursday, which saw Nedbank Private Equity exit the company after nine years.
What makes it significant is what it resembles. In substance it is the wholesale open-access network, known as the Woan, that the state spent more than a decade trying to licence and eventually abandoned. Asked directly whether that is what Comsol is now building, chief executive Iain Stevenson said: “I wasn’t going to say that. You’re welcome to say that.”
Who is building the new 5G network and what it runs on
Comsol is not a household name, but it is not new. It has held spectrum since 2010, built a national enterprise network from 2016, and launched a business-focused 5G fixed-wireless service in 2024.
The consumer network is a departure. It has a 5G core and no support for legacy technologies, and it has been under construction for six months.
The shareholder register has been rebuilt around it. The largest single shareholder is now Platform Investment Partners, the vehicle of Richard Came, a former Dimension Data director and an early backer of Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa. Wimsey Capital, a privately held investment company, has also come in.
Andile Ngcaba’s Convergence Partners, a shareholder since the company’s earliest institutional funding rounds, remains invested and has put in further growth capital alongside Solcon Capital. Stevenson retains a personal holding and has invested more. RMB arranged and provided the debt financing.
Stevenson declined to give a debt-to-equity ratio or a rand figure, saying only that the amount being put in to deploy the infrastructure runs into billions.
What it could mean for households without fibre
About 15% of South African homes are connected to fibre, concentrated in dense metros where the cost of trenching can be recovered.
Comsol’s pitch is aimed at the rest. Stevenson said the build is not confined to affluent suburbs, naming Diepsloot, Alexandra and Soweto specifically.
The company is leasing towers and fibre rather than building its own, which is what makes the economics work in areas fibre operators have skipped. Comsol says the design delivers roughly double the uplink of a typical operator fixed-wireless product, with physical capacity topping out just under 1Gbit/s.
Because services are not locked to a single base station, as operator fixed-wireless products usually are, customers should be able to move a router between covered areas.
None of that has a price attached. Comsol has not named the first ISP, and the resellers have not published packages. What a household actually pays will be set by those companies, not by the network operator.
That is the part worth watching, because South African connectivity remains expensive by regional standards. The Competition Commission found in its most recent cost of living work that although internet price increases have run below headline inflation, the country still ranked 31st out of 45 African countries for a monthly 1GB mobile package. A new wholesale supplier changes the input cost, not automatically the shelf price.
The build, the spectrum and the timeline
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Operator | Comsol Networks, Midrand |
| Model | Wholesale only, sold through ISPs and MVNOs |
| Core spectrum | 60MHz between 3.74GHz and 3.8GHz |
| Additional spectrum | 336MHz at 28GHz, acquired in 2010 |
| Licence issued | 2022, by Icasa |
| Equipment partner | ZTE |
| Coverage claimed now | More than one million Gauteng households |
| Base station target | About 2,000 nationally |
| First ISP live | September 2026 |
| Next regions | Rest of Gauteng by end 2026, then parts of the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal |
The coverage and timeline figures above are the company’s own and have not been independently verified.
ZTE won the build after what Stevenson described as a long evaluation in which Comsol tested every major vendor, with the decision resting on a full turnkey offering and the vendor’s millimetre-wave road map.
The licence conditions that set this apart
Comsol’s 60MHz allocation in the 3.7GHz band sits immediately above Rain’s holding. It was one of five smaller operators handed access to the band by Icasa, a decision that drew criticism at the time for bypassing a competitive process. The licence was issued in 2022.
Stevenson said the allocation is exclusive and national, and that Comsol carries no roll-out obligations and no defined licence renewal date.
That is a material contrast with the spectrum Vodacom, MTN, Telkom and others paid billions for at the March 2022 auction, which came with coverage and population obligations attached.
Comsol’s target is not the fibre operators. Stevenson said he does not regard them as the competition, though he conceded the company could be seen as a threat by fibre players moving into underserviced areas, where Comsol’s economics are stronger.
The mobile operators are the clearer target, because their fixed-wireless products compete for capacity with mobile traffic. Banks and retailers running mobile virtual network operators are explicitly named as wholesale prospects.
What has not been answered yet
Several things remain open, and they are the things that determine whether this reaches ordinary households.
No consumer pricing exists. No ISP has been named. The size of the raise has not been disclosed beyond the word multibillion, and no debt-to-equity split has been given. The coverage claim of more than a million Gauteng households is the company’s figure.
The technical question is capacity. Whether 60MHz can carry mass-market home broadband once take-up builds is untested at scale, and Comsol’s answer is that it will add base stations as saturation approaches.
There is also a track record to weigh. Comsol announced 5G trials with Verizon and Samsung in 2018, lit up a pilot in Soweto that September, and said at the time it intended to launch commercial consumer services before the end of 2019. In a March 2023 interview the company said it had no interest in the consumer market at all. This is a reversal, and the wholesale structure is how Comsol explains it: partners take the retail fight.
The infrastructure investment sits inside a broader pattern, with global technology firms expanding data and cloud capacity locally over the past two years.
The immediate marker is September, when the first ISP is due to switch on. Comsol says Gauteng will have blanket coverage by the end of this year, with parts of the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal deployed next, followed by selected regional towns and cities.
