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Nigerian Operators Eye 4G Technology
Published Jan 31, 2010
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Nigeria may be a market dominated by pre-paid 2G services, but operators in the country are actively looking at 4G technologies LTE and WiMAX, according to directors at Motorola.
Raphael Udeugo, Mototola's African director of sales, said that operators are already considering the future of data, and that LTE is being tested by some of the operators in Nigeria. "Definitely operators are looking at LTE and WiMAX as we speak," he told CommsMEA.
He added the Nigerian authorities plan to auction spectrum for WiMAX later this year. "I think between 2011 and 2012 we are going to see a turning point of broadband being able to serve demand in Nigeria," he added.
Furthermore, new spectrum could allow operators to bypass 3G upgrades altogether in favour of a leap to technologies such as WiMAX and LTE, according to Noel Kirkaldy, Motorola's director of solutions marketing. He said that this trend could allow the operators to "potentially get ahead of many other markets and put Nigeria on the front foot rather than playing a catch-up game."
Operators may also look upon 4G technologies as being a better investment than 3G, according to Kirkaldy, because operators recognise that 3G "would not be the ultimate solution for broadband."
"Voice is still leading the way in Nigeria and if you look at the cost of deploying 3G in relation to 2G, you still find out that you have more advantage in terms of 2G, mainly from the standpoint of handsets," he said.
"There is a tremendous advantage to roll out 2G and eventually migrate that to true broadband that will be LTE and WiMAX. That will complement the network that they have today and the plan is for them to address the data requirements while they still have the GSM for most of the voice issues."
Nigeria's telecoms sector has been dominated by wireless communications for most of the past decade, a trend that has been fueled by a lack of fixed infrastructure. While Kirkaldy thinks this lack of infrastructure is also likely to help drive demand for 4G technology, he added that "fixed infrastructure will probably become more widely deployed" as demand continues to rise.
"Eventually that trend will start to move back because as we know, once people access the broadband, the one thing that increases exponentially is the bandwidth and that will be the justification for operators to roll out fibre solutions in the coming years," he said.
Nigeria's mobile market is dominated by MTN Nigeria, Globacom, and Zain Nigeria, while the latest entrant, Etisalat Nigeria, is also gaining ground.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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