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2013 the year of LTE

10th January 2013

By: Natasha Odendaal

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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The roll-out of long-term evolution (LTE) was set to dominate the telecommunications industry this year and players failing to enter the market in 2013 would have “missed the bus”, Jasco executive head for technical and operations Martin Ferreira said on Thursday.

With surging demand for bandwidth from data-hungry devices, such as smartphones and tablets, it has become imperative for companies to get on board with the fast roll-out of LTE during 2013, as many of the major operators and industries would have established their place in the market, leaving slow adopters behind.

Companies such as MTN and Vodacom have already commercially launched LTE in some major cities, while smaller players such as Cell C and 8ta were undertaking trials of their respective LTE-enabled networks.

Last year, communications group Ericsson’s ‘Mobility Report’ stated that LTE was becoming the fastest-developing system in the history of mobile communications, with estimations that it would cover 50% of the world’s population and boast 1.6-billion mobile LTE subscriptions by 2018.

The report revealed that the total number of LTE mobile subscriptions rose from 9-million a year ago to 55-million by the third quarter of 2012, with 13-million new subscribers alone during the last quarter of the year. It is estimated that LTE coverage reached about 455-million of the population during the same period.

However, speaking to Engineering News Online, Ferreira said South Africa was not fully ready for the roll-out of LTE, and many challenges hampered the efficient execution of the latest-generation technology, including the lack of available LTE-capable devices.

He pointed to global technology group Apple prohibiting access to South Africa’s latest-generation network through its LTE-capable iPhone 5 while a review of the network was under way.

He noted that an end-to-end ecosystem was required to avoid hiccups such as this, with companies offering consumers fast, cost-effective and efficient access to the technology – from the device through to network.

The high capital costs of the LTE roll-out and infrastructure build, limited collaboration between industry players and a lack of infrastructure sharing, led to high costs to consumers using the new network.

Telecommunications group Cell C chief commercial officer Jose Dos Santos previously said a wholesale approach could ensure participation of all parties and could lower the input costs, as well as capital investment, for operators, while enabling the provision of better quality and service.

A lack of sufficient spectrum, which many had blamed on the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa’s weak allocations, also formed part of the factors hampering a full commercial LTE network roll-out.

Operators were currently refarming spectrum in efforts to deliver a faster network, but this affected the quality of the LTE transmissions.

Meanwhile, Ferreira said operators should make full use of the wide range of technologies developed to date and a redeployment of these technologies based on data demand and regions would enable a faster and more efficient roll-out of LTE.

Older-generation technologies such as Wimax should be deployed to rural regions, where there was no need or demand for fast high-technology broadband speeds, and faster technologies, including LTE, should be limited to the urban regions, which had a higher demand for data and required faster networks.

Third-generation (3G) technology, such as WCDMA/HSPA, was expected to cover 85% of the population and record 4.4-billion mobile 3G subscriptions by 2018.

Second-generation (2G) technology, such as GSM/EDGE, was expected to cover about 90% of the population, despite a decline in mobile 2G subscriptions from the current 4.6-billion to 2.4-billion by 2018.

Edited by Chanel de Bruyn
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor Online

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