Nigerian market leader upgrades network to enhance mobile broadband

Details: James Barton; Category: Wireless Networks; 31 July 2012; 9019 views

One of the largest operator groups in Africa is upgrading its Nigerian network to cope with booming demand for data...

One of the largest operator groups in Africa is upgrading its Nigerian network to cope with booming demand for data. MTN Nigeria will deploy Ericsson's latest wireless packet core network technology in order to introduce smarter functions and capabilities to enhance the mobile broadband experience for end users.

With over 120 million mobile subscriptions overall, Nigeria is the largest and one of the fastest growing telecoms market in Africa. Data traffic growth in Nigeria was 100% last year and the demand for mobile broadband is not slowing down, as internet services are becoming increasingly essential for more and more facets of people's lives.

The router will support the current 2G, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks of MTN Nigeria, plus will also be able to support future upgrades to LTE. This ability to support all the different types of access networks brings significant cost savings to operators, as fewer nodes with higher scalability can efficiently handle the network bandwidth growth.

The EPG (Evolved Packet Gateway) application has the capabilities to support 2G, 3G and 4G and the rapid increase in demand for IP data services. Lynda Saint-Nwafor, CTO of MTN Nigeria, says: "Deploying this platform will make our network more efficient and scalable to cater for the growing data demands of our subscribers."