Comsol Networks is closing a multi-billion-rand debt and equity raise to build a national 5G network, founder and CEO Iain Stevenson told Bloomberg. The plan is 2,000 base stations, scaling from 450 sites covering roughly one million households to national coverage by the end of 2028, with Chinese equipment maker ZTE as vendor partner.

Comsol will not sell to end users. The network is wholesale only, sold to the ISPs who resell it.

The spectrum is why this is even possible: Comsol picked up 60MHz at 3.7GHz from Icasa in 2021, alongside four other small operators, in an allocation that drew criticism at the time because the recipients lacked the balance sheets to exploit it. That objection is now being answered with capital.

Comsol also holds 336MHz of millimetre-wave at 28GHz, which Stevenson says is roughly three times anyone else's allocation, giving it 392MHz dedicated to fixed wireless access. Fibre reached only about 15% of South African households in a decade, almost all of them in metros.

BMIT expects 5G to account for 67% of residential fixed-mobile router connections by 2029, up from 35% in 2024, in a broadband market worth R82.8-billion.

The funding also reshuffled the share register, with RMB providing debt, Platform Investment Partners and Wimsey Capital coming in as equity, Nedbank Private Equity exiting, and Convergence Partners returning.

BusinessTech, carrying Bloomberg's interview, reported Stevenson's line that Comsol builds for demand that is coming rather than demand that is already here. MyBroadband detailed the contiguous 60MHz block between 3,740MHz and 3,800MHz and reports several ISPs have already soft-launched on the network. TechCentral documented the 2021 award and the criticism Icasa attracted for assigning that spectrum to smaller players.

Comsol is not competing with MTN and Vodacom. It is arming everyone else that wants to. A wholesale-only network means any ISP can offer fixed wireless in a suburb, town or industrial park where fibre never made the numbers work, without owning spectrum or building towers. That is new supply in exactly the part of the market the incumbents have priced as a premium.

If you run a business outside a metro, or an ISP sitting on LTE customers you cannot upgrade, this is a call worth making in the next 18 months rather than in 2029. The usual infrastructure caveat applies. Two thousand base stations by end 2028 is a plan, and Stevenson declined to say what the raise actually totals.

You might also like our piece on the SA 5G coverage gap this is aimed at, why Capitec home broadband needs precisely this kind of wholesale partner, and how WhatsApp web calling keeps draining operator voice revenue.

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