Rain and Huawei Jointly Launch Africa’s First Standalone 5G Network

Rain, South Africa’s data-only mobile network, launched its first Standalone 5G (SA 5G) network in the country.

Powered by Huawei, this is the first commercial standalone 5G network in Africa, and among a few networks of its kind globally.

Rain’s Standalone 5G is currently available in Cape Town covering areas including Sea Point in Cape Town, Claremont, Goodwood, Bellville, Durbanville, and Cape Town City Centre.

The newly released Standalone 5G network is built on Rain’s own sites. This allows Rain to significantly enhance its fixed wireless broadband (FWA) service experience in the covered areas.

“Standalone 5G will further improve 5G network performance with increased uplink rate, lower latency, and improved reliability, ushering in high-end cloud VR and cloud gaming services, more diversified enterprise and home broadband services,” said Rain Chief Marketing Officer Khaya Dlanga.

As the ultimate form of 5G networks, Standalone 5G supports advanced network-slicing functions and mobile edge computing (MEC), allowing Rain to explore new ideas and customised services based on ultra-low latency and much higher capacity with Standalone 5G, realised by Huawei’s Converged Core Solution and Massive MIMO technologies.

“Standalone 5G will demonstrate how 5G is powerful in realising South Africa’s 4IR future. Powered by Huawei’s global leading 5G solutions, our Standalone 5G will enable the industry’s digital transformation in the future, such as smart healthcare, smart ports, smart mining and smart manufacturing in South Africa.”

“We will work with the trustworthy strategic partner to further expand our 5G networks and bring the best service and experience to our customers,” Khaya added.