Liquid Telecom said on Thursday that MTN South Africa will roam on its soon-to-be-launched 4G/LTE network. MTN will be Liquid Telecom’s first customer on the network.
The wholesale roaming service will be made available across Liquid Telecom’s network nationwide, the company said.
In a statement, Liquid Telecom CEO Reshaad Sha said that with MTN as a customer, the company has “an opportunity to utilise our existing spectrum assets, so more people than ever will have access to fast and reliable mobile Internet — and across Liquid Telecom’s network nationwide for the first time”.
“This builds on our vision to give everyone the right to be connected by bringing high-speed broadband connectivity to all. The benefits are massive, particularly for organisations keen to fully embrace ‘digital transformation’ to improve productivity, customer service and performance,” Sha said.
MTN South Africa CEO Godfrey Motsa said in the same statement: “This sort of infrastructure sharing deal is good for the industry, as it reduces the need for excessively high capital investment and it is also good for customers, who immediately benefit from even greater access to fast and reliable mobile data.”
MTN rival Vodacom already roams on the 4G/LTE network being built by Rain. The additional capacity provided through Rain to Vodacom and Liquid Telecom to MTN should help offset some of the spectrum constraints the big operators are facing.
National network
Liquid Telecom announced in December that it planned to spend billions of rand building a national 4G/LTE network in South Africa and that it planned to offer wholesale roaming services to other operators from early 2019.
Using its spectrum in the 1.8GHz band, Liquid Telecom will provide wholesale access to the network to mobile operators and Internet service providers on an open-access basis.
The network will be designed to “meet the needs of the most demanding users across the country”, Sha said in December. The company hasn’t said how quickly it plans to deploy the network or how wide its coverage will be when it opens the network to other operators. — (c) 2019 NewsCentral Media
