Smile LTE
Smile Communications has put in place the first public roll-out in Africa of LTE in 800 MHz spectrum in Tanzania and has ambitious plans to roll out in the same spectrum in three more countries. This week it moved from soft to hard launch status in Tanzania and the other 3 countries will follow. Russell Southwood spoke to founder and CEO of the company Irene Charnley.
Smile Communications in Tanzania has been on soft launch status for the last six months, with the sales force quietly selling to commercial customers. Nevertheless it has managed to garner nearly a thousand subscribers before moving to the full hoopla stage of the hard launch.
Charnley believes that the potential in 2-3 years will be tens of thousands of subscribers in Tanzania. The subscribers are a mixture of commercial customers and households, with many commercial customers also using the service at home.
It now has 80% coverage of all the commercial areas in the country’s capital Dar es Salaam. By the end of this year it will have coverage in all of the country’s major cities and by 2014 it will have full national coverage. It currently also offers 30 hot-spots.
The service can be accessed in three ways: a router that’s sufficiently small to be called nomadic (US$210 plus 20GB of data); a dongle (US$114 plus 10GB of data) and a Mi-Fi unit (available shortly), which is half the size of a smartphone and can connect up to 10 people.
According to Charnley:”This will be a killer app. It has its own battery and allows all household members or the employees of small companies to access the same connection.” She’s also keen to emphasise that there is already an ecosystem of 200-250 LTE access devices out there already. The LTE signal is also much more effective than many of the WiMAX technologies at penetrating buildings.
As in most places in Africa, it’s selling data bundles that last 30 days. At the bottom end of the range 500 MB costs US$5.40 and at the top end of the range 50 GB costs US$192. Before the implementation of LTE, customers were on average using 5GB of data month and for 90% of the customer base this has now doubled to 10 GB a month. Even as numbers go up on the network, they say customers are getting an actual 6 mbps download speed.
As reported in our previous story in December, the big use story is video. No more buffering for live streams and download speeds that are actually achieved in a reasonable time period rather than several hours. And Charnley emphasizes the point that with no technical installation required, it is very easy to get almost instant access.
The company also operations in three other countries: Nigeria, Uganda and DRC. Uganda, which is currently in its soft launch phase (with hundreds of subscribers) will hard launch on 6 June. In Nigeria, it currently has had a soft launch in Ibadan and is rolling out in Lagos, with a hard launch planned for July. The DRC will switch on in December.
Interestingly, Smile will open up its wholesale capacity in Tanzania to both mobile operators and ISPs as a way of accelerating its own growth. It says it has had approaches from operators and is in discussions.
Although the existing network and business strategy is for data, the network is capable of carrying voice using VoLTE and the handsets for this will be available in June. But as Charnley says:”We expect most voice calls will be made by Skype, which as you can see from the call we’re having is crystal clear.”
The propaganda war has already begun. Tigo has also launched HSPA+ (which is usually described as 3.5 or 3.75G) in Tanzania and is calling it 4G. But as the roll-out of LTE accelerates, it will be the customers who make the judgements based on whether video streaming and downloading is better on HSPA+ or LTE.
Source: Balancingact-Africa
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