Nokia Siemens kicks off LTE roadshow in Lagos

NOKIA Siemens Networks (NSN), last week in Lagos, kicked off its Long-Term Evolution (LTE) road show in Nigeria with plans to extend this to Morocco, Bahrain, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi, Arabia and South Africa.

The Finland-based Nokia Siemens Networks is a leading global enabler of telecommunications services with focus on innovation and sustainability, and provides a complete portfolio of mobile, fixed and converged network technology, whereas having operations in 150 countries including the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region.

Head, Networks Systems for MEA at Nokia Siemens Networks, Mr. Mohamed Abdelrehim, said in Lagos, that they intend to unlock a new mobile broadband experience across the continent.

This, he said, would ride on its LTE offering to deliver improved and faster data speeds to support a suite of multimedia and rich call applications.

He noted that with Nigeria’s growing demand and need for mobile broadband, the growth for the country’s operators have now come gone to advanced mobile data service offerings, thus beyond basic connectivity.

LTE, he said, is the de-facto evolution path of the Third Generation (3G) mobile standard that is based on a full flat Internet Protocol (IP) architecture and is optimized for data and multimedia traffic.

“Having demonstrated the world’s first LTE demo with data speeds up to 160 Mega bits per second (Mb/s), Nokia Siemens Networks has been at the forefront of developments in this space,” he declared.

In Middle East and Africa specifically, he pointed out that Nokia Siemens Networks was behind the region’s first LTE contract with Zain Bahrain.

“Leading the evolution of broadband technology means our customers will be the first to benefit,” Abdelrehim said, stressing that today, they are reinforcing the vision of five billion people to be connected by 2015, via a showcase of the latest next generation mobile broadband technology to mobile operators in the region.

LTE will truly revolutionize the region’s mobile market, changing the way businesses and individuals communicate. The technology will unleash a plethora of new devices such as Internet telephones and videophones to end user services such as teleconferencing, telecommuting, to wider benefits in medical services such as remote diagnosis, interactive distance education, rich multimedia entertainment, digitally-controlled home appliances and much more.

NSN’s LTE proposition, he said, is based on software upgrades to current 3G networks that are currently deployed by a majority of regional mobile operators, underscoring that at the heart of its solution is the Flexi Base Station that supports multiple technologies from Global System for Mobile communications (GSM)/EDGE and Wide Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) cum High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) to LTE on a single platform.

“Being only 20 per cent of the size and weight of a conventional base station, it is energy efficient and designed to minimize the overall cost of network operation and maintenance,” he said.


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