With more than 3-billion cellphones in use worldwide, the demand for mobile broadband data services is escalating, says Pieter Uys, chief operating officer at Vodacom. <\/p>\n
“We have more than 250 000 3G\/HSDPA subscribers using our data service, which is getting close to the number of ADSL lines in use.”<\/p>\n
Mobile data access is playing a far more prominent role in SA than in the UK, Europe and the US, due to greater availability, higher performance and lower costs of ADSL there. “Only recently 4 megabits per second (mbps) ADSL speeds have been available in SA, compared to 8mbps in Europe.”<\/p>\n
HSDPA provides speeds of up to 1,8mbps, and this is expected to double over the next six months, putting on par with high-end ADSP speeds.<\/p>\n
From there, HSDPA speeds are expected to increase to 14 mbps by 2009 and to 30mbps to 70 mbps when the mobile networks move to LTE (long-term evolution) technology, which will take the mobile networks to 4G mobile communication, Uys says.<\/p>\n
The move to LTE will depend on the introduction of global technology standards and equipment that support it.<\/p>\n
LTE is based on orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) and makes better use of radio spectrum, Uys says.<\/p>\n
As a natural resource, there is a limited amount of radio spectrum available globally and there is therefore a need to build more fibre cable infrastructure in this country, as is happening overseas he says.<\/p>\n
Uys says Vodacom is putting fibre cable in the ground to support its own expanding infrastructure needs and provide bandwidth and managed network services to businesses, because Telkom cannot keep up with demand. It is also offering alternative ADSL services and is building a network to support WiMAX.<\/p>\n
Uys says Vodacom has shares in WBS, which owns iBurst, and WBS has been granted a full WiMAX license. “We will deploy any broadband access technology we need to.”<\/p>\n
Whether connecting to an ISP with a fibre, ADSL, wireless or mobile data service, internet response times depend on the availability of international bandwidth because most users connect to overseas sites. “This is why we need access to more international bandwidth in SA,” Uys says.<\/p>\n
He says the high definition footage for the 2010 World Cup that needs to be broadcast out of the country will take up a lot of bandwidth. “It takes two years to build an undersea cable, sp those involved better get going with it.”<\/p>\n