Nigerian CommunicationWeek

Over 30 HSPA Networks Go Live in Africa

High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), promoted by the Global System for Mobile Association (GSMA), continues to grow across Africa with more than 30 HSPA networks going live, according to information reaching Nigeria CommunicationsWeek.
Gabriel Solomon, senior vice president, GSMA, informed Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that HSPA continues to advance in Africa, with more commercial networks going live recently in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana; and the proportion of investment in HSPA in Africa will continue to rise significantly.
“There are more than 30 HSPA networks in Africa and this is set to grow significantly over the next few years. We anticipate that there will be around 1 billion HSPA subscribers globally by 2012 who will drive the economies of scale needed to make HSPA handsets, dongles and other device affordable for everybody, much like GSM phone today.”
He said that HSPA will evolve to HSPA+ (a software upgrade) that will provide speeds of around 80 Megabytes per second. “The natural evolution from HSPA is LTE (long term evolution) sometimes referred to as 4G. LTE networks will start to go commercial later this year.”
Internet cafes now use HSPA to connect to the Internet and HSPA dongles are popular, providing immediate and affordable broadband access to many millions of Africans.
In 2006, MTN South Africa invested £65 million which covered the uprating of high usage sites to support HSPA, allowing mobile broadband to be available to subscribers in most urban areas. By March 2006, it was the first operator in South Africa to launch HSPA commercial services, and the eleventh worldwide.
Currently, HSPA is marketed as a mobile broadband service, in direct competition with fixed-line and wireless broadband. It currently has the advantage of being faster, cheaper and easier to deploy than either Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) or wireless services, proving that mobile broadband can be the main Internet connection for business and consumer users.
Far from being an exclusive technology for wealthy corporate users, HSPA can resolve the last mile problem quickly, economically and reliably. In towns with poor fixed line infrastructure, or distant from a local exchange, mobile solutions are the only choice. But even when fixed-line options are available, HSPA can offer better data rates, easier deployment and improved provisioning, said the GSMA in a report.
Solomon also enjoined regulators in Africa to take the lead and assign key spectrum blocks to mobile, such as the digital dividend (700MHz) that will allow the industry to roll out mobile broadband services in rural areas and 2.1MHz and 2.5MHz that are excellent frequencies for mobile broadband in urban areas.

 

Exit mobile version