Cell C activates 5G, claims South Africa’s widest coverage without owning towers

Cell C’s 5G network is live and already available to customers, chief executive Jorge Mendes has told reporters, though the operator has held back a formal commercial launch.

Mendes disclosed the rollout only in response to a direct question, saying there had been no launch event and no mention of it in the company’s maiden full-year results, published the same day.

“I’m telling you this because you’re asking me the question,” he said. “Otherwise, strategically, we’ll launch it with propositions.”

Cell C achieves 5G without its own towers

Unlike its rivals, Cell C does not operate its own radio access network. It runs entirely on roaming agreements with Vodacom and MTN, and Mendes said this now gives the operator access to both networks’ 5G sites on their 2.6GHz and 3.5GHz spectrum bands.

“We’ve technically got the widest 5G coverage in the country at the moment,” Mendes said. “We’ve got all of Vodacom’s 5G sites, and we’ve got all of MTN’s 5G sites.“

Reaching that point required both host operators to release capital expenditure to enable access, while Cell C prepared its own core network to support the technology. That work is now complete, Mendes said, though the commercial proposition is not.

He argued that wide 5G coverage alone is not a compelling sell to consumers.

“5G is 5G. It does nothing more than what you already had,” he said. “Your YouTube video is going to play the same way it did on 4G.” Cell C is instead waiting to launch with something “quite unique,” which Mendes identified as likely centring on fixed-wireless access, though the commercial structures behind that offering are not yet built.

Also read: Cell C to list on Johannesburg Stock Exchange, targets growth enhancement

When asked about Comsol’s recent announcement of a new national 5G broadband network for South African homes, Mendes called it validation of Cell C’s own wholesale model, describing the two as complementary rather than competing. He also confirmed Cell C is in talks with Starlink and Amazon, both as potential coverage partners and as services it could resell to retail customers.

Alongside the 5G rollout, Cell C is migrating customers to voice-over-LTE technology, with roughly a million customers already moved and about three million more expected to follow in the coming months.

Cell C’s capital expenditure for the year stood at R810 million, with guidance of R750 million to R850 million for FY2027, a fraction of what South Africa’s larger operators spend on their own infrastructure.