LTE-5G in the Middle East and Africa.
- LTE has been launched by 201 operators in 66 countries in the Middle East and Africa (including fully mobile networks and FWA broadband networks using LTE).
- LTE services have been launched in a number of countries in the past year including Guinea, Mozambique, Niger, Syria, Togo, and Yemen (FWA only).
- Some most of the world’s few remaining LTE ‘not-spots’ can be found in the Middle East and Africa. Not-spots include: British Indian Ocean Territory, Cabo Verde, Central African Republic, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, French Southern Territory, Mauritania, Palestine, Sao Tome and Principe, South Sudan, and Western Sahara.
- LTE-Advanced networks have been launched in 34 countries within the Middle East and Africa, by 66 operators (nearly a third of all LTE network operators in the region).
- A further seven operators are testing/trialling, planning or are deploying LTE-Advanced networks.
- The commercially available LTE-Advanced services in the Middle East and Africa include some of the fastest in the world. Turkcell’s LTE-Advanced network can now support Cat-18 devices with peak download speeds of up to 1.2 Gbps. Ooredoo Qatar’s network supports speeds of 1 Gbps (Cat-16).
- However the majority of the region’s LTE Advanced networks are much slower, supporting a maximum of Cat-4 (45.3% of all the region’s LTE-Advanced networks); Cat-6 (39.1%), and Cat-9 (6.3%).
- Commercial VoLTE services have been launched by 33 operators in 22 countries in the Middle East and Africa.
- Operators that have launched VoLTE in the last twelve months include Alfa (Lebanon), Etisalat Misr (Egypt), MTN (South Africa), Safaricom (Kenya), Syriatel (Syria) and Viva (Kuwait).
- A further eight operators in the region are known to be investing in VoLTE.
- The 3GPP IoT status in the Middle East and Africa is unchanged from mid-2018. Sixteen operators in 10 countries in the Middle East and Africa are known to be investing in NB-IoT, and three operators in three countries are investing in LTE-M networks.
- Six operators are known to have launched NB-IoT: Etisalat, UAE; Ooredoo, Tunisia; Partner, Israel; Turkcell, Turkey; Vodacom, South Africa; and Vodafone, Turkey.
- Two operators are known to have launched LTE-M: Etisalat, UAE; and Turkcell, Turkey. MTN in South Africa is trialling the technology.
LTE-5G
©2019 GSA
