Uzbekistan’s second commercial LTE network has been deployed by Ucell, a subsidiary of Swedish firm TeliaSonera. The network uses equipment supplied by ZTE.
This news follows on from the Russian operator MTS launching a commercial LTE network in Uzbekistan last month. These deployments have made Uzbekistan the first market in the world to have competing commercial LTE networks – a fact that cements the central Asian country’s position as a key territory in the nascent global LTE market.
TeliaSonera meanwhile has already deployed commercial LTE in Norway and Sweden, and is trialling services in other markets. The new network in Uzbekistan supports peak download speeds of 100Mb/s using ZTE’s software defined radio and Uni-RAN infrastructure solutions.
Ucell has claimed that the network can deliver speeds which are “ten times faster than today’s 3G networks”, although the average rates for the majority of LTE networks are notably lower than the claimed maximum speeds.
Ucell is the second largest mobile operator in Uzbekistan; MTS is the largest. Their combined market share is 78 per cent.
