4th December, 2012
Etisalat Nigeria’s head of Engineering and Deployment Department, Mr. Valentine Amadi has highlighted the need for telecommunication operators to effectively deploy 4G infrastructure for a new market in Africa.
This call was made recently at the Africa Com conference and exhibition organised by Informa Telecoms and Media in Cape Town, South Africa.
Speaking during the Mobile Broadband and LTE sessions chaired by SVP Strategy & Communications Wholesale, Orange and Chairman, UMTS forum, Jean-Pierre Bienaime, he emphasised the importance of a review of existing infrastructure, regulatory, environmental and government issues and the need for government to take over construction of service ducts on roads in Africa for telecoms installations.
He said: “Strategies for deployment of 4G network are chiefly determined by factors such as technology, regulatory terms, market size, environment/location as well as cost/project finances. With a global market of 5 billion, a projected penetration level of 47% by 2017, majority of the 1.8billion anticipated new connections are expected to come from the developing economies which are deficient in infrastructure development with roughly 62% of Africans living in urban slums.”
He further listed the fundamental institutional issues confronting operators in delivering a 4G network as spectrum assignment and availability, choice of technology across countries and continents, quality of service regulations for networks in hybrid architecture, convergence of platforms for all services, lack of infrastructure (power, transmission, transport, security), adverse local operating environments, uncertain regulatory environments and complex fragmentation of LTE frequencies at national and regional levels.