Rain, one of South Africa’s larger mobile network operators, recently announced its goal to accelerate its 5G network rollout to cover an estimated 5,000 new households per day for the duration of 2021.
Rain openly markets itself as an unlimited data network, offering particularly fast internet for those customers in its catchment areas. They were the first operator to launch a commercial 5G service in the country in 2019, offering a single uncapped, unthrottled package priced at a then competitive rate of just R999 per month.
When the company initiated this service, it was only available to businesses and select residential areas across Johannesburg and Pretoria. At the time, there were 250 Rain 5G towers that covered an estimated 500,000 households. This launch proved to be successful and over the past 2 years, the network provider has expanded its coverage almost six-fold. Rain 5G now covers an average of 3 million households across Gauteng and the city of Cape Town.
Rain is currently in the process of deploying its 5G network to Durban, KZN.
To cater to its large number of new clients, Rain’s engineering team has joined forces with Huawei’s Research and Development department to implement the necessary upgrades.
Customer service is another key point that Rain has addressed. In order to bolster its customer service platform, Rain has done the following:
- It has employed more than 600 additional customer support agents.
- Call centre systems have been refined and upgraded.
- Customer care operating hours have been extended from 8 am to 8 pm, 7 days a week.
- An Android app named “myrain” has been developed to provide an easy-to-use self-service platform to customers.
- A device management system has been created to allow the remote management of 5G devices in the field.
In addition, Rain has also invested significant capital into improving its systems with back-up power to curb the problem of load-shedding.
The end of 2021 will announce the status of the company’s success