MTN to use 900MHz spectrum for 3G

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milomak

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What does this mean for the layman?

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- MTN Group Ltd. will use some of its
its 900 megahertz spectrum for 3G services, the company said in
a statement handed to reporters in Vredesvallei, South Africa
today.
Click to expand...
 
This means MTN is catching up to CellC's new network spec.

in laymens - faster, better connectivity. I heard the 900MHz signal has a larger footprint per tower, thats all i Know.
 
All correct :)

900 MHz provides (according to Cell C) 3x to 5x better coverage, which means that fewer towers are needed to give coverage of an area. This reduces cost which is obviously good for any operator.

The challenge is that 900 MHz is currently used for voice - spectrum must therefore be re-farmed which can be difficult in high-densite areas. Therefore no surprise that MTN wll use this strategy in rural areas.
 
Basically 3G coverage similar to GSM coverage, upto 90% coverage around the country...
 
I think they'll leave it at 3G, wont go into the high data rates since there's just too little bandwidth at that low center frequency. But then again, haven't researched how much they've given MTN.
 
Last edited:
UnUnOctium said:
Yes, it does. But you would only be able to use GPRS, at best :p
Click to expand...

Sorry about the 21 questions,but why is that?

CellC brought it down to 900MHz and its 21mbps and it was slower at higher frequencies,but the lower you get the less badwidth is available?

What frequency does a TV work on,like SABC :confused:
 
OMG!!!! MTN is building a 4Gs network too!!!! :wtf:

</joke>

I hope MTN don't run into too many difficulties, and I really hope they compete on price soon :D
 
moose007 said:
Sorry about the 21 questions,but why is that?

CellC brought it down to 900MHz and its 21mbps and it was slower at higher frequencies,but the lower you get the less badwidth is available?

What frequency does a TV work on,like SABC :confused:
Click to expand...

Happy to answer:

21.1 Mbps is HSDPA cat. 14 standard. Since it's a fixed standard with fixed constellation mapping, source coding, modulation etc. It has a fixed, predictable bandwidth. Clearly, Cell-C owns enough at 900 MHz to shift their transceivers' central freq. there. The reason you most likely experienced slower speeds at higher frequency is that you had worse attenuation since the RF signals suffer more loss the higher the frequency they are (most basic example, and too idealistic for a practical model, is free space path loss). This results in lowered signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which means that the bit-error rate (BER) becomes so high that, and this is how transceivers are designed today [Adaptive coding & Modulation], it switches to a smaller constellation so that your BER is reduced. This means less errors but also means reduced speed (since 1 symbol is now say 5 bits instead of 6).

Now, this is great in that if we move comms down the frequency range, we get better rates, sure. The problem is, you have other people who have licensed spectrum, so you don't have everything to yourself, i.e. you have fixed bandwidth. If you have been given x amount of bandwidth by ICASA at around 900 and hsdpa cat. 14 only requires <x, perfect, move it. The problem becomes when you want higher data rates. There's a practical difficulty in implementing transceivers (called the Q-Factor) in that the filters' bandwidth are a percentage of their centre frequency. i.e. the higher you go, the larger the pass-band of your filter. This is why ITU-T and others agree to place lower rate (smaller signal bandwidth) communications lower down the frequency range so that we don't have narrow bandwidth signals with large, un-used bands up top. All this in layman's terms is the compromise of longer range vs higher rates.

Hence why if there was (and there isnt) cellular hardware at 300 MHz, the bandwidth it would get would probably only be sufficient for GPRS.

With regards to TV, the lower end of UHF is at around 900 MHz. SABC is VHF if I remember correctly, but e-TV is UHF.

P.S. excuse all bad typing, frozen fingers :p
 
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Actually, Cell C is using 850Mhz UMTS which is why a lot of phones and devices (like iPad) won't work on their 3G network.

edit sorry - I see 900 Mhz. Most devices like Ipad support 850Mhz.
 
SO if 900Mhz is so much better, why didn't they use it from the word go?
 
In terms of phone support? Would all phones support 3G+ data on the 900Mhz network?
 
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