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South Africa could benefit by up to nearly $58 billion over the next 10 years by enabling 1,200 license-exempt megahertz in the 6GHz band, helping the country to bridge the digital divide, as well as improve access to remote education, work, and commerce.

But government has so far failed to release it.

The total $57.76 billion consists of $34.81 billion in GDP contribution, $13.32 in producer surplus, to South African businesses, and $9.63 billion in consumer surplus.

Wireless Access Providers Association (WAPA) collaborated with Dynamic Spectrum Alliance (DSA) in South Africa over several months to compile the data that led the findings. Three further studies were simultaneously conducted by DSA and its partners for Nigeria, Kenya and Indonesia, all with similar findings.

The DSA is working with the Digital Access Programme in the UK to share its spectrum expertise. The study in South Africa and elsewhere was to assess the service quality, coverage, and affordability impact of different applications for the unlicensed use of the 6GHz band.

The DSA’s president, Martha Suarez, said, “It will also play a crucial role in bridging the digital divide in these countries, enabling improved access to remote education, work and commerce. Wifi needs greater spectrum access in the 6 GHz band to effectively support the modern digital ecosystem.”

“Opening up 1,2GHz of spectrum would more than double the spectrum we have available in South Africa right now, even after the recent spectrum auction” says Paul Colmer, executive at WAPA. “To put that in perspective, prior to the recent auction, we had 5GHz available and that was made available nearly 20 years ago.”

That’s why, says Colmer, the prospect of bandwidth in the WiFi 6E band of 6GHz would be so enormously beneficial across the spectrum of society. Additionally, newer equipment and methods of using it are more spectrally efficient than ever before, which would extend the usefulness of the bandwidth even further.

The WiFi 6E band is broken into two main portions. The lower band encompasses 5,925MHz to 6,425MHz and the upper band encompasses 6,425MHz up to 7,125 MHz. The DSA has urged governments to provide unlicensed access to the 700MHz of the upper band.

WiFi 6E is WiFi6 extended. It provides numerous 160MHz channels and provides the fastest WiFi yet because it delivers multi-gigabit, low latency connections essential to supporting 5G services. 

Colmer says this will have more positive effect than just making new spectrum available.

“The current WiFi 5 spectrum is heavily congested because many devices are vying for the same band of frequency. The end result is that it causes interference and that limits effective ranges. New spectrum offloads some of that traffic so not only is it not interfering by using a different frequency band, there is less congestion on the old band,” he says. “That makes it more reliable, faster, and more effective.”

Issued by Paul Colmer, executive at WAPA