Sudan launches LTE 4G services, beats Egypt to it
Zain Group, the mobile telecommunications company operating in Sudan, announced launching the 4G LTE services in a number of Sudanese cities.
In cooperation with Sweden’s Ericsson, a multinational corporation that provides communication technology, the 4G LTE service will be operated to include Khartoum, Port Sudan, Al-Ubayyid, and other cities. The Swedish company will be responsible for the establishment of the essential infrastructure while Huawei Corp will take over the next phase of the project.
Meanwhile, Egypt is still studying the release of new 4G frequencies within this month of May. This was a long overdue step for Egypt to take, at a time when about 157 countries around the world have already included 4G services for their clients, said Yasser El-Kady, Minister of Communication and Information Technology.
Egypt was one of three countries in Africa did not put investments in these services including Libya and Chad.
In a press conference held in Khartoum, Zain Sudan added that LTE services are going to cover 20 percent of users in the first phase. Zain Sudan initially launched 4G services with nearly 300 sites that are on air now, with 21 other cities in the regions set to gain coverage by the end of 2016, with 15 of them by the end of June. The population coverage of the 4G network will reach over 20 percent in the first stage of roll out.
However, the three mobile operators working in Egypt showed 80 percent readiness to receive 4G services and demand finalising all required settings in terms of infrastructure including frequencies, cables needed to link services and cell signal booster towers
LTE is a 4G wireless communications standard developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) that’s designed to provide up to 10x the speeds of 3G networks for mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and wireless hotspots. 4G technologies are designed to provide IP-based voice, data and multimedia streaming at speeds of at least 100 Mbit per second and up to as fast as 1 GBit per second.
