This year started on a high note as the 5g became a thing. With 5g you can easily get to 2 Gbps. This kind of speed is wild and if it were to get implemented now this speed would be revolutionary. But we won’t be getting there for at least another 5 to 10 years. Yes, it could take 10 years. This sounds very pessimist considering that there are parts of the world that run on 5g right now. Here are my two main reasons why we don’t expect 5g in Kenya any time soon.

The good news first: A section from the Daily Nation said that “Currently, it only Safaricom that is testing 5G's feasibility in Kenya. Through its TubeStar Base Station, the telco is expected to launch the network early next year in urban centers. Telkom and Airtel are still laying out infrastructure for 4G.” While this sounds great it's important to note that 4G came out 10 years ago and only less than 10% of the country has reliable 4g network coverage. I am still very skeptical that Safaricom has enough initiative to pursue this.

5g is still very early in its development. The maximum range for a typical 4g tower is 72km. For a 5g node or what you could call a 5g tower you only get about 500m. You would also need to be in direct sight of the node, so in buildings, around comers, past a tree then the node doesn’t serve you anymore. This is simply impossible to implement in a city like Nairobi. With the current technology, we would need more nodes than there are buildings.

Without unlimited data, 5g would be completely useless. On Safaricom, at top speed, you’d only get 20 seconds worth of data with Ksh 10,000. Very impractical. The good thing about this is that with time the billing charges will most definitely change.
What’s sad is that the US & China will probably have 5g by the end of next year, are we honestly 9 years behind these giants? Really sad! 5g will be great once it gets here but right now what most of us need is only 150 Mbps of 4g plus, actually, just make it 100 Mbps.

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