Two South African billionaires are backing a new 5G network

The family of Chris Otto, who co-founded PSG and was a founding director of Capitec, has invested in Comsol, a new South African 5G network alongside Richard Came, who co-founded Dimension Data.

Comsol will launch a consumer 5G-Advanced network in Gauteng by the end of this month and expand nationally from there, following a multi-billion-rand investment round. Iain Stevenson, the company's chief executive, declined to give the value of the transaction or a breakdown of the shareholding, saying only that control had not changed.

Wimsey Capital, the Otto family's investment vehicle, took part alongside Platform Investment Partners, where Came serves as executive chairman. Came established that firm with Shaun Clark, who runs it as chief executive.

Company records show Otto was a director of Wimsey Capital from 2001 until he stepped down in 2020. Its current directors include his daughter Zephne Ladbrook, who chairs the Otto Foundation, and Diderik Otto, a wealth manager at PSG.

Nedbank Private Equity exited Comsol last year. Platform Investment Partners bought in with a transaction that closed in December, and Wimsey followed. Andile Ngcaba's Convergence Partners, a long-standing shareholder, put in further growth capital alongside Solcon Capital, and Stevenson invested more of his own money through Mactavish Investments while keeping his existing stake. RMB arranged the funding that made the shareholder transaction possible and will support the capital expenditure programme.

A wholesale network, not a retail one

Comsol will not sell to consumers. It plans to blanket the country with around 2,000 base stations and sell wholesale capacity to internet service providers, which set their own pricing and packaging.

"It's going to be a wholesale network delivered through Internet service providers," Stevenson said. "There's a well-established consumer ISP ecosystem in South Africa. We're sticking to our knitting: that's how we've serviced the enterprise space, it has worked well, and that's what we're going to do as we move into the consumer market."

Several providers have already soft-launched on the network and are running independent tests. Stevenson declined to name them, saying the service becomes fully commercial in early September, and added that effectively all of the large providers would be on it.

Afrihost has listed three Comsol products, starting with an uncapped 25Mbps service at R275 a month, rising to R549 for 75Mbps and R875 for a package including a router. Each carries fair usage thresholds that reduce speeds beyond set data volumes.

Construction began six months ago and the network already covers a substantial part of Gauteng.

"We should have blanket coverage there by the end of the year, after which we'll focus on the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and other regional towns that require connectivity," Stevenson said. Those provinces follow in 2027 and 2028.

"This isn't focused only on affluent suburbs. It's intended to reach every nook and cranny within the provinces and areas we cover."

The technical bet

Comsol selected ZTE after a lengthy request-for-proposal process, on a turnkey basis covering both the core and the radio infrastructure.

The network runs a standalone 5G core without a 4G anchor, unlike South Africa's established mobile operators. Stevenson said it is one of only two production standalone cores live in the country and that Comsol will be the only operator wholesaling a full standalone offering, which he said delivers ultra-low latency, dedicated capacity control and roughly double the uplink performance of a typical mobile network.

The launch uses a contiguous 60MHz allocation in the 3.7GHz band dedicated to fixed wireless access. Comsol also holds 336MHz of millimetre-wave spectrum, which Stevenson said is about three times any other holder's allocation.

Pricing to providers works on a per-SIM subscription basis rather than by gigabyte, customised to each one.

"We work very closely with ISPs, and we tailor the productisation for them," he said. "Effectively, those products are shaped within our environment, and it is their product."

Who is behind it

Otto co-founded PSG Group with Jannie Mouton and was among the founding directors of Capitec, which grew into one of South Africa's largest retail banks by customer numbers.

Came co-founded Dimension Data, the information technology services company that grew out of Johannesburg into a global operation before NTT acquired it in 2010 for about £2.1 billion.

Ngcaba chairs Convergence Partners and the Comsol board. He served as director-general of South Africa's communications department after 1994 and has spent the two decades since investing in telecommunications infrastructure across the continent.