4G licence frequencies Kenya - Last month, Kenya announced it would not offer 4G licence frequencies to individual telcos but would instead tender it to a consortium of firms to implement and manage. Under this arrangement, operators who are not part of the consortium will be expected to lease 4G/LTE connectivity at a fee. This is a departure from what happened with the 3G network licence, which Safaricom and Telkom Kenya paid millions of shillings to acquire individually. Michael Ouma spoke to the Africa head of technology at Nokia Siemens Networks, Karri Kuoppamaki, on what the development means for Kenya's mobile telephone scene as well as the global LTE licensing trends.

What does this joint licence mean for the country's four mobile network operators?

As the details related to the licensing are not yet published, it is hard to comment on the actual implications for the existing four mobile network operators.

Network coverage and quality are the most important drivers for loyalty to service providers. This is very closely followed by cost and billing. The rapidly increasing demand for mobile broadband services poses the challenge of meeting customer expectations in terms of quality and coverage, as well as demand for affordable services.

How will this happen and will this help lower costs?

Network sharing is one of the options to cope with the challenge as, typically, the higher the degree of sharing, the more the cost savings. However, this is at the cost of reduced control over capabilities, services and resources. Today, the majority of licences and networks are still independent.

Globally, multiple examples of network sharing exist today. Examples include the UK, where France Telecom's Orange and Deutche Telecoms T-Mobile formed a joint venture for a shared network to provide better coverage, faster roll-out and an expected cost reduction of £2 billion ($3.2 billion) over 10 years. We've also seen benefits of this type of arrangement in Kenya through the deployment of the TEAMS (The East African Marine System) submarine fibre optic connection and the building of a national fibre optic backbone.

What does the development entail for operators (apart from Safaricom and Telkom Kenya) who are yet to pay for and deploy 3G networks? Is it still attractive for an operator to deploy a 3G network in Kenya now that modalities are being laid for 4G/LTE deployment?

Future networks, driven by demand for wireless broadband, will be more heterogeneous in terms of access network technologies. This will result in a need to deploy layered access network architecture and to integrate diverse radio access technologies to provide a seamless mobile broadband experience.

High speed packet access (HSPA) definitely has a role in this. Today, HSPA is the mainstream wireless broadband technology with a healthy device ecosystem and global adoption. The HSPA technology is also evolving beyond its current capabilities with the next standardisation release supporting peak data rates in excess of 600Mbps.

How will the deployment of 4G/LTE networks impact on device or handset vendors like Nokia, Samsung and LG, among others?

A healthy device ecosystem is key to successful deployment of any technology, and it is important that the 4G/LTE deployment in Kenya should benefit from global economies of scale. The key to this is to follow the spectrum bands and band plans adopted globally for LTE.

The device ecosystem development for LTE has been much faster than for previous generation technologies and device manufacturers must keep up with the pace of demand as well as the requirement for multiple device categories including dongles, multimode smartphones and integrated consumer electronics, among other range of devices.

What's the situation like in other countries as relates to 4G/LTE licensing? Are the licences being issued to consortia or individual network operators?

There are great regional and national differences in how licences are issued. However, we see a trend for network sharing and capacity wholesaling or having consortia managing the licence and network.

There is the Orange/T-Mobile network sharing case in the UK. Other cases include 3GIS in Sweden, Yota in Russia and Lightsquared in the US.

In Sweden, 70 per cent of the country is covered by a 3GIS's shared network, built as a joint venture between Telenor Sweden and 3. When a user is in one of the main cities, his/her calls are carried by the native network infrastructure of Telenor or 3, while outside the cities, the call roams onto the shared network provided by 3GIS.

In all of these cases the driver has been faster roll-out, better coverage and reduced cost, speaking of the benefits of network and licence sharing arrangements.

The East African/26/09/2011