Comsol launches wholesale 5G home broadband in South Africa

Six months of building has put a 5G signal within reach of more than a million households in Gauteng. Comsol will not sell broadband to consumers; instead, it is entering the home broadband market as a wholesale infrastructure provider, selling capacity on a purpose-built 5G-Advanced network to internet service providers (ISPs). This expansion is backed by two new shareholders, Platform Investment Partners and Wimsey Capital, following the exit of Nedbank Private Equity after a nine-year investment. Comsol owns and operates the network end-to-end, while its partners retain the customer relationship, including branding, packaging, billing, and support. The company emphasizes it does not compete with the service providers it supplies and that its API-driven platform enables partners to launch branded offerings within weeks. This model echoes the open-access model that reshaped South Africa’s fibre market, where the network owner sells wholesale and the retail brand sits with the ISP. The company received its C-band spectrum licence from ICASA in 2022 and holds the country’s largest contiguous allocation of 28 GHz spectrum alongside 60 MHz in the 3.7 GHz band. Comsol’s network is one of only two production 5G standalone cores currently live in South Africa, offering roughly double the uplink capacity of a typical mobile 5G network. The company anticipates the market shift toward 6G and aims to serve South Africa’s enterprise, private, and public sectors. Comsol is targeting full coverage of Gauteng by March 2027, with the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and major regional centres following in 2027 and 2028. The national plan calls for about 2,000 base stations. About 15% of South African households are connected to fibre, with fixed wireless subscriptions rising roughly 39% year-on-year in 2025. Research firm BMIT expects 5G to account for as much as 67% of residential fixed wireless connections by 2029, up from 35% in 2024. Comsol’s 5G wholesale model faces challenges, as seen in Ghana, where Next-Gen InfraCo’s exclusive model was stripped of its 5G wholesale monopoly in July 2026 after failing to deliver expected rollouts. Competition among South Africa’s network operators has shifted, with smaller fibre operators outperforming the country’s largest eight in an ISPA perception survey published in July 2026. Funding for the expansion comes from Convergence Partners, Solcon Capital, and additional investments by Iain Stevenson through Mactavish Investments. RMB arranged the funding package supporting both the shareholder transaction and the capital expenditure programme. Comsol’s strategy involves leveraging its spectrum and nationwide network presence to capitalize on the transition from 5G to 6G.