Africa Tech Festival: MTN profits fall, but speed surges

If you heard that MTN dropped a bombshell this week, you could assume it shocked investors with a massive 31.5% fall in voice revenue in the last quarter. But we should expect nothing less, as the traditional voice becomes an irrelevance in a data-led world. By pure coincidence, in almost the same breath, MTN completed South Africa’s first trial of 5.5G mobile data connectivity.

Demonstrated during the Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town on Tuesday, the trial saw MTN reach mobile data speeds of 8.6 Gigabits per second. That’s not going to come to your cell phone very fast:  most handsets support the previous 4G and 5G generations of connectivity. However, the same was said of 5G when the first demonstrations of that technology took place just five years ago, in 2019.

This week’s trial suggests we will have 5.5G phones before the end of the decade, with speeds that put to shame even today’s high-speed fibre-to-the-home broadband.

Back in February this year, at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Huawei corporate senior vice president Li Peng pointed out that 4G had taken nine years to reach the same adoption levels as 5G has in the last five years. The implication that 5.5G would roll out even more quickly was underlined in this week’s demonstration.

Critics are quick to point out that 5.5G is not an official standard, but it sets the agenda for the next version, in the same way that 3.5G once laid down the foundations for 4G. The GSMA, the industry association for mobile operators globally and host of MWC, prefers to call it 5G Advanced, in the same way that 4.5G became LTE Advanced.

The technology promises to converge AI, cloud and 5G, which will in turn allow telecommunications players to market new applications and capabilities, as well as improving the quality of mobile networks. New capabilities include enterprise functions like technical business-to-business services and precise positioning, and consumer services like glasses-free 3D and communication via virtual avatars.

Dario Betti, CEO of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum, which represents several hundred companies serving the mobile industry, said at the time  that 5.5G was critical for the mobile industry to leverage AI.

GSMA Intelligence head Peter Jarich said: “While consumer requirements will continue their trajectory, we’re now seeing use cases beyond that. True 5G brings home 5G’s early promise, particularly where slicing, low-latency and massive IoT capabilities tied to enterprise service needs can be met. 5G-Advanced will only extend that further.

MTN South Africa completed this week’s trial in partnership with Huawei, describing it as a “10-gigabit experience”. It would “promote the development of South Africa’s digital economy through connecting the unconnected and support the enhancement of the lives of its people:”.

“In the 5.5G era, technological innovations will enhance network performance, increasing capabilities by ten times compared to current 5G technology,” it said in a statement. “That means 10 Gbps headline connection speeds, 10 times the number of IoT connections, reducing latency by a factor of 10.  Networks also consume a tenth of the energy that they consume today on a per Terabyte basis, and through level 4 autonomous driving, making operations and maintenance more efficient by a factor of 10.

“The 10-gigabit experience will expand new commercial services for consumers, households, and enterprises, accelerating the development of advanced use cases such as 24K Extended Reality (XR), High Speed Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), holographic conferencing, enhanced 5G private networks, and more.”

Li Chen, vice president of the Sub-Saharan Region of Huawei, said that “bringing the most advanced technologies to Africa” would help bridge the digital divide, accelerate the development of the digital economy, and speed up “the advent of the mobile AI era on the African continent”.

* Arthur Goldstuck is CEO of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on social media on @art2gee.