Finally, there’s what Van der Bergh calls ‘mission-
critical services’. These refer to any situation that
involves life or death, and could include remotely
driven vehicles, remote medical facilities, industrial
automation, and suchlike. It’s the type of high-speed,
low-latency connection that would enable a medical
surgeon to operate, in real time and via a surgical robot,
on a patient who’s on the other side of the planet. Those trials achieved download speeds of more than
20Gbit/second, with blink-of-an-eye latency (network
round-trip time) of just 5 milliseconds – the highest
speeds ever achieved on a mobile network in Africa,
and significantly faster than the fastest connections
available to South African consumers over fixed fibre-
optic lines.
It all sounds very futuristic, but that future is already
here. MTN recently partnered with equipment vendor
Ericsson to conduct 5G trials in Africa, while rival
operator Vodacom has run similar trials with Nokia –
both with a view