Comsol targets South Africa’s FWA sector with wholesale 5G-A offering

Details: John Tanner; Category: Wireless Networks; 21 August 2026; 1104 views

South African fixed wireless connectivity and private network operator Comsol announced on Thursday it’s entering the country’s home broadband sector with a wholesale 5G-Advanced fixed wireless access (FWA) offering.

Comsol aims to blanket South Africa with around 2,000 5G-A base stations. It has already been building the network for the past six months, with over 1 million households in Gauteng currently covered.

Comsol is targeting full coverage of Gauteng by March 2027, with expansion scheduled for the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and major regional centres in 2027 and 2028.

The company will offer its wholesale 5G-A FWA network to ISPs, wireless ISPs, MVNOs and new market entrants keen on offering home broadband services. Comsol will own and operates the network as an end-to-end wholesale product, while its customers will control the subscriber relationship and go-to-market strategy, including branding, commercials and support.

“We see 5G-Advanced for the home as a big growth opportunity,” said Comsol founder and CEO Iain Stevenson in a statement. “This is why we were investing in licensed spectrum years before its strategic value was widely understood and building private 5G before the market had grasped what it would enable.”

Comsol currently holds South Africa’s largest contiguous holding of 28 GHz spectrum, as well as 60 MHz in the 3.7 GHz band that it acquired from ICASA in 2022.

FWA growth opportunities

Accoriding to figures from ICASA, fibre passed less than 30% of South African households as of mid-2025, while around 15% of households are actually connected to fibre, mostly in dense metro areas.

Comsol said that presents a major opportunity for 5G FWA in suburban markets where it can be deployed quickly, covering entire towns in weeks, at a substantially lower cost than fibre.

Several service providers in South Africa already offer FWA services, with FWA subscriptions growing roughly 39% year on year in 2025, according to ICASA. ICT analyst firm BMIT expects 5G to drive uptake of FWA over the next few years, forecasting 5G to account for 67% of all residential FWA connections by 2029, compared to 35% in 2024.

The 5G-A advantage

Comsol said a key advantage it offers its FWA customers is its standalone 5G-A network, currently the only such network in South Africa. (Rain operates the country’s only other standalone 5G network, but has not yet evolved it to 5G-A.) Comsol said standalone 5G-A offers a level of ultra-low latency and dedicated capacity control that non-standalone 5G can’t match, as well as roughly double the uplink performance of typical 5G networks, making it a superior option for FWA.

More to the point, Comsol said its network is specifically engineered and designed to enable 5G FWA services that can support streaming, video calls and smart-home use cases, which make up the bulk of home broadband needs.

Comsol also offers an API-driven platform that enables partners to bring a branded 5G-A FWA offering to market in weeks, as well as build differentiated packages for different customer segments and implement or adapt products within hours, while retaining a high degree of control over their products and customer engagement.

Comsol’s push into the wholesale home broadband space is backed by two new shareholders: Platform Investment Partners and Wimsey Capital, who have stepped in following the exit of Nedbank Private Equity. Major shareholder Convergence Partners is investing additional growth capital in Comsol, as is Solcon Capital and Stevenson, who also holds a stake in the company.

Comsol said that RMB “arranged and provided an innovative and holistic funding solution that enabled the shareholder transaction and will support the business in its strategic capex rollout plan.”