Additionally, WiMAX will not last for long - very few major vendors are investing in continuous R & D in Wimax.Mobile Wimax is still a mirage.It's not good for spectrum efficiency, and re-use. A good number of speculative companies acquired small chunks of spectrum from CCK and rarely used them. Hence Safaricom trying to consolidate this Spectrum. LTE is the future and it's here. There have been successful trials in Nigeria and South Africa on the continent earlier in the year, achieving upto 70 Mbps on the DL.Initially designed for 2.6 GHz but ITU encouraging regulators to free up 600 - 700 MHz for better coverage. Current dongles are not multiband but next commercial releases will be able to support GSM/3G as well, hence having a seamless integration with older technologies for handling inter technology handovers, as these can be implemented on same BTS sites as GSM/3G. With the LTE access bandwidth operators will be able to do quadraple play with providing savings on spectrum but with similar QoS. Obviously Safaricom needs to increase wallet share as voice ARPUs decline steadily. With their P&L it's not difficult to see why they are pioneering LTE in Kenya. rgds, William Baraza
My pedestrian view is that this is as follows, We all know that data penetration in this country is not even at 20% and yet voice is actually among the highest in Africa. Like wars are won in the air, on the ground and in the sea, so shall it be with data business. They are definitely looking at high speed mobility via LTE, reliable high capacity links via fiber and of-course the quick to execute reasonable broadband d connectivity via WiMax. We all know that WiMax spectrum is never enough that is why there is the element of use and re-use of spectrum on a base station. Still this is not enough because most of the spectrum owners have just about 7Ghz of capacity. This will never be enough especially in high density areas such as cities which have radios all over the joint. It is for this reason that any service provider looking at growing the cake would want to lay their hands on any available capacity even if it is for the sake of mitigating against interference within the network. Besides, it would make more sense to put a wireless base station in a small city than lay fiber to serve just 200 customers (the figure here hypothetical). Remember, when the ARPU's on voice begin shrinking, growth has to come from somewhere.
BR, Shim...
On 9/1/2010 11:12 AM, David Kiania | Asentric Consulting Ltd wrote:
Could someone who understands Safcom's data strategy explain it to me in English. According to press reports they have began technical trials on 4G (LTE - Long Term Evolution) with Huawei. At the same time they have been on an acquisition spree swallowing each and every WIMAX operator in the country.
Already they are the largest ISP and Data company in Kenya, LTE will allow them to do faster data speeds and wide coverage. So why in the world to they have to acquire Instaconnet and the rest? Are they buying customers? They don't need to given they are the largest brand already.
SOS (Saidiaa OOOh Saidia).
Kiania D.
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