2015 Trends

Gilat Satcom: Dan Zajicek's 2015 Trends

At the AfricaCom show last November, Ahmad Farroukh, CEO of MTN South Africa, said that his company is focused on NGN for both mobile and fixed access, with LTE already available in parts of the country.

Users across Africa are indeed ready for LTE and the higher-speed data services it brings. However, to ensure that LTE is a good experience for users, an effective backhaul network is vital.

In Africa this backhaul will be provided by both fibre and satellite and during 2015 backhaul providers will need to prepare their networks for LTE.  Significant investments will be necessary to provide and manage the additional capacity required; LTE consumers typically use 5x more capacity than 3G users and 50x more than 2G.

In addition, lower prices per mbps will also need to be achieved. We will see bandwidth being shared within the network as capacity management becomes more dominant in the network design. We will also see more collaboration between competitive companies as the number of opportunities fall but the projects get larger.

2015 will be the year that LTE networks will be built throughout Africa.

Dan Zajicek is the CEO of Gilat Satcom.

 



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