Ghana was expected to be the first African country to launch the LTE technology for mobile, but the country has been beaten to it by Angola and Namibia.
Last week, Namibia’s Mobile Telecommunications Limited launched the LTE technology in the country’s capital city, Windhoek, making it the second in Africa after Movicel of Angola launched the first LTE technology in Africa in April with technology from Chinese telecoms equipment markers ZTE and Huawei.
The technology known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the latest standard in the mobile network technology tree that produced the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA network technologies.
LTE is part of the GSM evolutionary path beyond 3G technology, following EDGE, UMTS, HSPA (HSDPA and HSUPA combined) and HSPA Evolution (HSPA+). Although HSPA and its evolution are strongly positioned to be the dominant mobile data technology for the next decade, the GSM family of standards must evolve toward the future. HSPA Evolution will provide the stepping-stone to LTE for many operators.
Alcatel Lucent’s Vice President for North, West & Central Africa, Frederic Sallet had told ghanabusinessnews.com in an exclusive interview at the sidelines of the telecoms conference, the West & Central Africa Com in Dakar, Senegal in June 2011that the company was working on introducing the LTE technology in Ghana.
At that time he said, “We are currently working on LTE in Ghana. We are in a lot of discussions on that subject for the Ghanaian market. And giving the lead that we have on this market and the strong success that we have in the US and that we are starting to have with some operators in Europe, Middle East and Africa, I think Ghana could be a good place to start LTE,” he said.
Information available to ghanabusinessnews.com indicates that an unnamed company has won the bid for the license for LTE in Ghana, but there are challenges with the frequency on which the system runs and so it doesn’t look likely that the LTE technology will be up and running in anytime soon, until the bottlenecks are sorted out.
By Emmanuel K. Dogbevi
Is interesting for the such technology to take so longg to come on stream ion Ghana since Ghana have excellent educated knowledge based IT infrastructure. A lot of these are as a result of greed, corrupt society Ghanaians are embroile into.
Ghanaian metality need to be change for this country to successed.