Comsol Takes Its Wholesale 5G Network to More South African Towns With ZTE

Comsol and ZTE deepened their partnership at the 15th ZTE Global Summit and User Congress in Kuala Lumpur, an event co-located this year with GSMA’s M360 ASEAN gathering. Comsol has sold enterprise connectivity in South Africa for close to three decades, and it is now running a wholesale 5G-Advanced network that other providers resell to households.

The consumer service began in August as a national wholesale 5G broadband rollout covering more than 200 towns, mixing licensed wireless with fibre.

The gap Comsol is aiming at sits outside the cities. ICASA’s State of the ICT Sector Report, published in March 2026, put South Africa’s 5G population coverage at 58.02% for 2025, and rural coverage in the Northern Cape at 13%. The same report measured average mobile broadband download speeds rising from 30.36 Mbps in 2022 to 65.7 Mbps, and valued the country’s telecom market at about $11.21 billion. Licensed fixed wireless is one of the cheaper ways to reach towns where a fibre build does not pay for itself, which is why Comsol is selling capacity to other service providers instead of chasing subscribers directly.

“With nearly 30 years of experience delivering secure and reliable connectivity solutions to enterprise customers in South Africa, we are now extending that expertise into the consumer market through our wholesale 5G-Advanced network,” said Francois Olivier, Comsol’s chief of network strategy.

Comsol has also opened offices in Kenya, taking the same wholesale model into East Africa.