Telecommunications giant Telkom on Tuesday announced plans to take its long-term evolution (LTE) offerings to the next level by launching LTE-Advanced, offering speeds of more than 200 Mb/s by December.

Speaking at the MyBroadband 2014 conference, in Midrand, Telkom COO Dr Brian Armstrong revealed that, by March 2015, more than 50 suburbs would be covered by the next evolution technology that would enable Telkom to future-proof its capabilities.

“This is not a trial. [This is a] commercial launch [set for] December … by March, it will be online,” he stated, adding that the first selected suburbs were in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.

“Our LTE-Advanced platform runs on the 2.3 GHz spectrum, [which] allows us to offer efficient, high-quality and stable LTE-Advanced technology to our customers,” he said.

This comes as the nationwide roll-out of LTE by Vodacom, MTN and Telkom Mobile continued after Vodacom launched the first commercial network two years ago.

Telkom currently boasts 1 250 LTE-enabled sites, which was expected to increase to 1 400 by next year.

Armstrong pointed out that the group was currently upgrading its network to accommodate initial peak speeds of over 200 Mb/s on the LTE-Advanced sites after conducting trials and tests last year.

LTE-Advanced had the potential to reach peak speeds of up to 3 Gb/s and, even on the lower end of the speeds available, was comparable to the performance of fibre.

The new addition to Telkom’s broadband technology portfolio emerged as the company progressed its ambitious fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) programme as part of its broadband strategy to position itself as the “clear broadband leader”.

The group’s FTTH connectivity project, which aimed to enable guaranteed speeds of 100 Mb/s on the network across 20 suburbs, had passed nearly 2 000 of the targeted 25 000 homes.

Telkom, which had more than 147 000 km of fibre and 16 588 fibre distribution points, enabling more than 100 000 services, aimed to light up its FTTH across all its targeted regions by December.

The 20-suburb roll-out was only the first phase, allowing the group to study the uptake and demand for FTTH.

Telkom’s broadband strategy would see the deployment of targeted technology spread of mostly very high bit rate digital subscriber line, or VDSL, fibre and FTTH, with LTE and asymmetric digital subscriber line, or ADSL, comprising 30% and 10% respectively in the long-term.

Armstrong concluded that the detailed LTE-Advanced product offerings and prices would be announced in due course.