MTN launches LTE pilot in Gauteng

MTN launched its LTE (Long Term Evolution) pilot project at an event in Johannesburg today (14 July 2011) after sending an event confirmation message to attendees with the subject, “And MTN said: Let there be speed.”

LTE is the technology expected to supercede 3G technologies like HSPA and is considered a significant step towards full 4G technologies like LTE-Advanced.

MTN South Africa CTO Kanagaratnam Lambotharan revealed in May 2011 that they were conducting vendor trials in Gauteng.

Today, Lambotharan unveiled the network’s pilot project in Gauteng, comprising 100 sites in 4 coverage clusters. He said that they haven’t worked beyond Gauteng, but added that it would be easy for them to do so, and they will do so soon.

According to Lambotharan, LTE offers a dramatic increase in speed, but more importantly, a decrease in latency compared to other 3G technologies.

Lambotharan also shared the following technical details of the deployment:

• Still using the 1,800 MHz band as the 2,600 MHz spectrum is yet to be allocated.
• It will be a data-only service as voice over LTE has not been commercially deployed.
• They make use of a category 3 Huawei end-user device, capable of 100 Mbps downlink speeds and 50 Mbps uplink speeds.
• Peak throughput at 70 Mbps using a 10 MHz channel and 2×2 MIMO
• Average latency: 15-20ms
• Coverage per site on average: 600m
• Only a limited number of users will be allowed to use the network.
• All sites are using fibre back-haul.

Lambotharan said that they could have easily deployed a lab trial showing peak speeds upwards of 150 Mbps, but they wanted to give subscribers an idea of what they could really expect from such an LTE network.

Huawei 4G LTE dongle

MTN LTE international Speedtest results

MTN LTE Speedtest South Africa