Does Zimbabwe have 5G?

Does Zimbabwe have 5G? From 2022 in the month of February Zimbabwe officially has a 5G broadband network. The first company to pioneer this relatively new technology is none other than Econet Wireless. 

Econet has been ahead of the internet connectivity game for years now. It is also currently the company with the most coverage for WiFi services through its subsidiary Liquid Telecom. Liquid sells bandwidth to many other internet service providers in Zimbabwe. It is also present in 8 other countries that are in the sub-Saharan area. 

What is 5G? 

Since 2020 there have been some very crazy conspiracy theories around covid-19. One of them was that covid-19 was caused by 5G towers. Crazy right? That is probably all you know concerning 5G. 

But let us break it down a little and talk about what 5G really is and why it is beneficial. 5G is simply an improved version of broadband services for mobile networks that use sim cards. 5G gives you better bandwidth which means that your internet connection will be stable. 

The latest we have had is 4G and there are times when it is unstable, especially during peak hours. You also get more speed when you are using 5G than you would from 4G. During a speed check, it was found that Econet’s 5G can reach up to 3Gigabytes per millisecond(3000Mbps)! 

That is very fast. You can download videos in less time now or you can stream with no signs of buffering at all. Lastly, with 5G latency is reduced significantly. This means that there are fewer delays between action and response. With 4G we experience about 4-10 seconds delay when streaming live. When using 5G latency is reduced to less than 20 milliseconds. 

Which African countries have 5G? 

5G is still a very new technology and a few countries globally have 5G. So far Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe now have active 5G. South Africa and Kenya have much more infrastructure compared to Zimbabwe which has towers in very few areas. 

Nigeria is in line to launch it for the very first time. The introduction of 5G is a bit step for African commerce since most of the population accesses the internet via mobile phones. With popular platforms like WhatsApp being used for business, we will likely see a lot of innovative ideas that will take advantage of this high-speed internet connectivity.

Who invented 5G? 

There is no one company that is single-handedly working on 5G. A number of companies in the telecommunications space have been working on improving previous technologies to come up with 5G. 

One company that has played a big role in coming up with the foundational technologies behind 5G is Qualcomm. In Zimbabwe the company that will be helping in setting up more 5G infrastructure is Ericsson. 

These are exciting developments and we might start seeing technology from futuristic movies being used in our lifetime. We have already started seeing it with companies like Tesla building self-driving cars.