Nigeria - LTE is seen as a major boost to mobile broadband

[daily independent] New technologies designed to drive economies and meet high market demands, have continued to make their debut in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector across globe.

Prominent among them is the Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, currently being driven by Nokia Siemens. The company says it is using LTE technology to build sustainable mobile broadband future for several countries and is willing to do the same in Nigeria.

Addressing a press conference in Lagos on the importance of LTE technology in driving broadband evolution, Mr. Mohamed Abdelrehim, Head of Networks Systems Middle East & Africa, Network Systems at Nokia Siemens Networks, said "as billions of machines, devices and objects of varying nature get connected to the internet, LTE has the right architecture and efficiency to support new customer experiences and business opportunities, which will increasingly be the battleground for differentiation between communications service providers (CSPs)."

Poised to make a clear difference in broadband service offerings, Nokia Siemens has opened talks with telecom service providers in Nigeria, putting before them, multiple advantages of LTE technology to include easy upgrade from radio network and transitioning to an all-IP flat network architecture; network readiness; accelerated broad ecosystem; high intelligence network; boosting economies of next generation connectivity; better understanding of consumer experience; among others.

According to Abdelrehim, "LTE remains a highly efficient all-IP technology that offers strong business case for both existing telecom operators and new entrants." LTE supports GSM, CDMA and TD-SCDMA and enables easy migration to other forms of technologies, and Nokia Siemens offers a complete end-to-end solution portfolio that supports interoperability.

Also speaking on the LTE technology, Mr. Seyed Ali Emam, head of Customer Marketing for Nokia Siemens, said "the company has been at the forefront of LTE development, as well as being the first supplier in the world to demonstrate LTE with data speeds of up to 160 Mbs, and the first to complete a handover between LTE and other technology. Our involvement extends into standardisation and testing, as well as helping to drive LTE standards. We have invested in performance and interoperability testing, and we have a strong record in IP network innovation, having developed our entire portfolio from core network to operational support systems and services to align with requirements of LTE."

As demand for innovative technologies continues to increase, especially in 2010, the stage appears set to witness the world's first LTE mobile networks in action, as being gradually introduced into the Nigerian ICT market by Nokia Siemens. There have been flurry of industry activities to roll out commercial-grade equipment and demonstrate all-important compliance with LTE standards, and Nokia Siemens is saying much of the hard work has been done and it is over to c service providers to bring the technology to market over the next few years. The company has challenged telecom operators on the need to embrace LTE technology and make a difference in broadband service delivery.

The LTE offering is coming just in time for many service providers that are faced with rapidly rising data traffic in their networks, while also needing to implement new types of services and applications.

Accelerated Demand

The demand for high bandwidth networks is noted by the GSM Association (GSMA), which has recently reported that the rate of growth of high-speed packet access (HSPA) mobile broadband connections has increased by nearly two-thirds in the last year, according to figures from the Wireless Intelligence database. That means there are now more than nine million new HSPA connections being added globally every month, compared with 5.5 million a year ago, and demand is accelerating. "HSPA technology continues its phenomenal growth as thousands of operators, vendors, application and service providers back the technology, ensuring the presence of a vibrant and competitive ecosystem," says Dan Warren, director of technology at the GSMA. "This expanding ecosystem also encompasses the next generation of GSM technologies, HSPA+ [HSPA Evolution] and LTE." As the GSMA notes, there are now 62 HSPA+ network commitments around the world, with 36 running live commercially, and the next benchmark for the mobile broadband peak downlink data speed will be 21 Mbits/s. More than 50 mobile operators have already committed to LTE plans, trials or deployments that will take this speed well beyond 100 megabits. "LTE is widely regarded as the de facto mobile broadband technology that will be adopted by the vast majority of mobile operators globally," the GSMA reports.

LTE Milestones

Last year, Nokia Siemens Networks said it reached major milestones on the way to make LTE commercially available and they are about more than raw data speeds. "A key initiative is One Voice, in which a group of leading industry players, including Nokia Siemens Networks, AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Nokia and others, has defined a preferred way to ensure the smooth introduction and delivery of voice and SMS services on LTE networks worldwide," says Mohamed. "It is a technical profile based on existing functionality that all industry stakeholders, including network vendors, service providers and handset manufacturers, will use to offer compatible LTE voice solutions."

One Voice builds on the functions of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), as defined by 3GPP, as the best approach to meeting customer expectations for service quality, reliability and availability when making the move from existing circuit-switched telephony services to IP-based LTE services. "This is an important step as the objective of the initiative is to ensure the widest possible ecosystem for LTE and to avoid the fragmentation of technical solutions," adds Mohamed.

"Now LTE will not only serve as broadband access for higher data traffic, but also for voice and SMS services."

Commercial Reality

According to Mohamed "the focus is on commercial hardware and software, not pre-commercial intermediate solutions. We have already shipped LTE-capable Flexi Base Station hardware to 140 customers, and also conducted the world's first LTE handover test using a commercially available base station and fully standards compliant software. The handover test was the first to be fully compliant with the 3GPP's baseline LTE standard."

The company believes that milestones are crucial because the commercial reality of LTE is that it will be a complex ecosystem that includes not only operators, infrastructure providers, terminal vendors, standard bodies and regulators, but also chipset manufacturers, application developers, content platform providers and consumer electronics vendors.

Although most operators in the Middle East and Africa have embraced LTE technology in spreading broadband, Nigeria is just being slowly introduced into it by Nokia Siemens. It is however believed by industry stakeholders that LTE would truly revolutionise the Nigeria's mobile market, changing the way businesses and individuals communicate. The technology is expected to unleash a plethora of new devices such as internet telephones and videophones to end user services such as teleconferencing, telecommuting, to wider benefits in medical services such as remote diagnosis, interactive distance education, rich multimedia entertainment, digitally-controlled home appliances, among others.

LTE, no doubt, will change the face of broadband services, should Nigerian telecom operators embrace it.

Nigeria: Boosting Mobile Broadband With LTE Technology