Africa cannot leapfrog to 5G without first making cities fit for 4G

Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s fastest urbanising region. Urban areas currently contain 472mn people, a figure which will double over the next 25 years (Centre for Strategic & International Studies, 2019). TowerXchange Meetup Africa featured a panel discussion and a number of roundtables looking at how urban infrastructure would evolve in Africa with the introduction of 4G and preparations for 5G. Lars Stuber, Founder of Smallcell moderated our panel with Nic Naidu of Vodacom, Marco Xu of Huawei, Lawrence Boya of Johannesburg City Municipality and Vinay Chaudhry of Tangerine, a Ugandan ISP.

For the last ten years, towercos have played a crucial and growing role in connecting Africa’s swelling urban population through macro sites, leveraging backup diesel generators and microwave backhaul. All three will continue to play a major role, but street furniture, hybrid power and fibreisation must all grow in importance, and each new element will involve changes by MNOs, towercos and their partners in the telecoms sector, local government and other landowners. The technologies and stakeholders involved will expand and the ecosystem will get more complicated.

Almost every country in SSA is now seeing 4G investment, even SSA’s poorer countries like Niger are seeing investment in 4G in the capital, Niamey. However, there is still limited support at the central or local level for investment in telecoms networks, in fact licence fees, taxes and slow permitting at a local level are among the principle inhibitors of telecom development. Engaging at a local level with municipalities and landowners will be essential to enable denser 4G networks to be rolled out widely and cheaply, and for 5G to become a reality in Africa.

Lawrence Boya, chief of Johannesburg’s Smart City programme sees both 4G and 5G as enormous opportunities for the city, and emphasised that the city needed to actively welcome the technology and get ready for investment. The City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality will not be providing 4G or even 5G, but they have to help create the platform for the technology out of existing infrastructure.

Johannesburg has street poles, tall buildings and access to land, all of which are essential for telcos. Where street poles exist in Africa, they often have access to power, but not of the reliability and wattage required for a cell site, so they are not straightforward to adapt as cell sites, even if municipalities are cooperative. When the will is there, what is needed is more conversations between MNOs, towercos and the city about how infrastructure can be leveraged.

Other panellists were pleased by the reaction from Johannesburg to telecoms investment, as often municipal governments can see telecom investment as something to be regulated or taxed and not supported. For example, in Uganda and Tanzania where Tangerine’s Vinay Chaudhry has experience, many cities do not act like partners. For example, in one city in Tanzania the roads belong to two different organisations so wayleaves are complicated to acquire. Similarly, licences for telecom activities are expensive, and are treated as primarily sources of government revenue, not enablers of development.

Our South African panellists agreed that vandalism and theft were major issues for urban infrastructure in South Africa, and the issue is widespread in other African markets too.  In Johannesburg, infrastructure which benefits the community, including cell sites, are targeted by vandals, and increased security can only go so far in addressing this.

Theft and vandalism are high up Vodacom’s risk register, ranking alongside energy stability and energy supply in seriousness. Vodacom can spend 200mn Rand (US$14mn) a year replacing stolen batteries. Without a sense of common ownership, Lawrence argued, the vandalism would continue. Where the infrastructure is seen as belonging to someone else, people feel they can vandalise it.

Education and community engagement is crucial to keeping infrastructure safe; communities have to buy-in and see the value of the infrastructure. When urban furniture is shared in the future, communities will need to be educated about the benefits and the system of sharing will need to be seen as fair and beneficial.

In contrast to what has happened in Africa, Huawei’s Marco Xu informed us that in China, they introduced a policy dictating the fibre needed to reach 99% of cell sites, and a similar policy dictating mass tower fibreisation was introduced in Malaysia where fibre to sites and to buildings must reach more than 90%. With the introduction of 5G licences in June 2019 in China, landlords in China must now provide fibre to the enterprise and, for example, if an airport is publicly owned, it is now their responsibility to provide 5G for their tenants through agreements with a MNOs or a towerco. Even a local Mayor’s KPIs include how many 5G sites must be built and coverage levels in next one to three years.

For example, Shanghai’s municipal government added 40,000 5G base stations within two years. For the Shanghai Mayor to report that he has hit his goal, he must make life easier for towercos and MNOs. In Africa there are no city level commitments, let alone country or continental plans to support 4G in this way, let alone 5G. This severely retards in building connectivity investments and prolongs bottlenecks in connectivity.

Vodacom’s Nic Naidu remarked that African mobile operators simply lack the budget to invest in fibre, 5G or indoor solutions on this scale. There are many offices and malls which could use improved indoor connectivity, in fact, the opportunity in South Africa is overwhelming, but a lack of capital means that China is not the best comparator for African telecoms investment.

In building solutions have not been widespread in Africa. African Towers has built a portfolio of 150 IBS in Ghana, and malls and office buildings in South Africa are now seeing good quality indoor solutions, but where malls have needed coverage in Ghana, Eaton Towers found it easier to put up a tower next to the car park, rather than negotiate with the landlord.

Some landlords now understand that good connectivity increases the value of their property, supporting rental income and making their mall or office more attractive. However, some do not, and there has been conflict between MNOs and towercos seeking a sustainable model for in building solutions across Africa. In South Africa, MNOs have taken to working with landlords in order to own the connectivity in a location and resell it to South Africa’s other MNOs. Towercos have struggled to gain a foothold in the market in South Africa as the MNOs retain a strong position in the country.

Towercos are keen to enter the in building market in South Africa and are exploring options in other countries too. Deploying capital into large developments and then providing connectivity to MNOs on an opex-basis fits the towerco model well, and a single large landowner incentivised to enable connectivity might prove easier to work with than some municipalities. When 5G begins to come to Africa it will find an early home in major property developments.

“What is 5G?” was the first question posed to our African 5G roundtable at TowerXchange Meetup Africa 2020. For a towerco, 5G will mean a spike in weight, increased wind load, higher power consumption and additional amendments. Small cells are unlikely to be involved in the earlier stages of 5G rollout in Africa because macro sites are more likely to be used with Massive MIMO antennas.

Massive MIMO antennas are far heavier than traditional antennas, but can be affixed to traditional macro towers once upgraded. Moving to the 10x denser networks for 5G that have been suggested in the U.S. would be ruinously expensive in Africa, especially as it would require a substantial densification of distributed energy infrastructure as well as multiplying site counts, so the use of Massive MIMO antennas on existing infrastructure will be essential.

When it comes to power, Telstar in Australia has reported a doubling in power consumption at their 5G sites, from a baseline already much higher than at most African cell sites. The increase in wind load is harder to quantify as a lot depends on how high up on towers the heavier Massive MIMO antennas are installed, as stress on the tower doesn’t scale linearly.

Even if installed at low heights, new 5G antenna – some of which measure 50x300cm – will require strengthening of towers and perhaps even wholesale replacement if foundations need strengthening too.  5G also means fibreisation of sites, without which 5G’s famed uplink and downlink speeds will not materialise.

Our panel agreed that if towercos only look at 5G in only operational terms, they will be unable to become the partners in digitalisation they seek to be. Towercos need to help create the right environment for 5G and support infrastructure development across the telecoms value chain.

Africa is still a long way from 5G becoming a commonplace reality, not only because ARPUs are low, but because much of the cell site, backhaul and power infrastructure necessary is lacking. However, 5G is live, just, in Africa, with Vodacom launching some commercial 5G sites in Lesotho, where higher ARPUs, a cooperative regulator and good existing infrastructure made a launch relatively straightforward. While Vodacom’s Nic Naidu was pleased to discuss Vodacom’s success there, he did not argue it would be possible to transfer this success cross-continent, although he did suggest that it Lesotho offered some interesting transferrable insights for South Africa, such as more available spectrum and a cooperative regulator.

The challenges of densifying networks for 5G is largely overstated. Because 5G has been rolled out in places like the U.S. first using mmWave, there is a widespread belief that 5G signal propagation is low, but that is not the case. In the 3.6GHz band propagation is low, but 5G can also use lower frequencies with familiar propagation distances through Massive MIMO antennas, as discussed at length at our roundtable on 5G.

Fibre backhaul is rapidly improving in South Africa, but outside South Africa fibre backbones are lacking and fibre to the tower is extremely limited. Huawei’s Marco Xu saw improvements in fibre as a key precursor for 4G, let alone 5G. But once fibre is in place for 4G sites it will be reusable for 5G. Municipalities will be key partners to making 4G and 5G a reality, if fibreisation is supported and rights of way made available then a more connected Africa can be a reality, but progress among municipalities to support telecoms investment is patchy at best.

There is much to be optimistic about for investing further in urban African telecom towers, but there is still much improvement necessary before 5G becomes a reality. So before asking if African cities ready for 5G, the question should be have they even made the most of 4G yet?