South Africa has conducted its first domestic voice call over 5G.
This achievement was made by Vodacom on the company’s test network.
The company stated that this was a pilot call prior to launching the service on its live network; however, no start date for the service was announced.
Until now, 5G in the country had only been used for data transmission.
This new technology, known as Voice-over-New-Radio (VoNR), will serve as an upgraded version of the VoLTE (Voice over LTE) service that Vodacom South Africa has been offering since 2014.
With the new technology, call setup times will be shortened, voice definition will be enhanced, voice quality will improve, and background noise will be eliminated.
Vodacom stated that it used a Single Packet Core (SPC) for the VoNR call, noting that its deployment is generally complex and requires cloud orchestration, cloud-native applications, and network upgrades.
Nevertheless, they emphasized their determination to overcome this milestone.