Glo Launches LTE June 1

Barring any last minute hitches, Nigeria’s National Operator, Globacom, will launch LTE services on its Glo network in Nigeria on June 1, persons very familiar with the operator’s inner workings, have told IT & Telecom Digest. It will be the first mobile phone operator in Nigeria to launch the new technology service in Nigeria – unless another operator launches before June 1.

The launch will mark the beginning of the real data war among mobile operators in Nigeria. But more importantly, it is an image game: who among the four GSM operators – Airtel, Etisalat, Glo and MTN – takes the first all-important step in this new cutting edge service.

Internet service providers such as Smile Communications and Spectranet are already providing services on the LTE platform; but this has not come home yet to mobile phone providers who control the bulk of subscriptions in Nigeria. All four of the GSM operators, Airtel, Etisalat, Glo Mobile and MTN, currently have a haul of over 142 million active subscriptions as of February 2015.

LTE will provide great boost to efforts to rollout broadband services across the country, besides making such services more robust and at better quality than the current experience.

As we broke the story on the acquisition of Visafone by MTN, that the real interest is the use of the CDMA operator’s spectrum; and, Globacom already has this valuable resource in its kitty, the battle now moves to which of the mobile operators launches LTE services first.

“You know Globacom doesn’t like to play second fiddle to anyone; so, it is very clear that this imminent launch of LTE on June 1 is to send a serious message: that Glo stays ahead of the pack,” said a source who would not want to be named.

Although there has been no official word from the leading mobile phone operator in the country, that is MTN, the “body language”, as one industry expert put it, “should tell anyone who is following developments especially with the acquisition of Visafone by MTN as you (IT & Telecom Digest) reported, that MTN is not folding arms and watching while Glo takes the shine off it.

“I won’t be surprised if MTN announces official launch of LTE services prior to June 1,” he was emphatic. “Just look at some of the advert copies and commercials that MTN has been dishing out lately; maybe many miss the import of the messages. But one just has to read across – not just between – the lines,” he wrapped up.

Smile Communication was said to have muted plans to launch free mobile calls for all its data subscribers, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – exactly the same way as Skype, blackberry voice or viber, among other Over The Top services, a step that can potentially spell doom for the Nigerian mobile phone operators. Voice is still king, in their revenue stream.

This has not been confirmed by Smile, though.

However, Smile is being held back by the regulator’s approval, it was learnt, which is said to have declined to give its consent to such a move “because the mobile operators acquired their licences to provide voice essentially, and granting such opportunity to Smile, which is essentially an ISP, is like eroding the efforts and permission granted the mobile operators,” sources close to the regulator hinted.

According to the GSM Association (GSMA), Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a mobile network technology that is being deployed by mobile operators on both the GSM and the CDMA technology paths.  Depending on the spectrum available, live LTE networks can deliver very fast data speeds of up to 100Mbps in the downlink and 50Mbps in the uplink.

Designed to be backwards-compatible with GSM and HSPA, LTE incorporates Multiple In Multiple Out (MIMO) technology, the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) air interface in the downlink and Single Carrier FDMA in the uplink. This combination provides high levels of spectral efficiency and network performance, coupled with high network capacity and low latency. LTE will support spectrum channel bandwidths from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz and can operate in both paired spectrum (in FDD mode) and unpaired spectrum (in TDD mode).

Although both LTE and WiMAX use the OFDMA air interface, LTE’s compatibility with existing GSM and HSPA networks enables mobile operators to continue to provide a seamless service across LTE and existing deployed networks.

LTE networks have now been launched by mobile operators in Europe, Asia and North America. In the U.S., the largest CDMA operator, Verizon Wireless, for example, launched commercial LTE services at the end of 2010.

LTE-Advanced

LTE-Advanced is designed to enable a further step change in data rates.  Incorporating higher order MIMO (4×4 and beyond) and allowing multiple carriers to be bonded together into a single stream, LTE-Advanced’s target is to achieve peak data rates of 1Gbps.

Other innovations being incorporated into LTE-Advanced include the use of non-contiguous frequency ranges (to alleviate congestion in the increasingly-crowded core spectrum bands), base stations that will be able to connect themselves to an operator’s network and the seamless integration of femtocells using so-called self-organising network techniques.

Standards body 3GPP intends LTE-Advanced to be its technology candidate for the ITU-R IMT-Advanced process, which is intended to identify ‘4G’ technologies.

By MKPE ABANG