Airtel completes 4G LTE trial in Nigeria

NIGERIA: Airtel Nigeria has taken a giant stride in its quest to pioneer innovation and lead a new phase of telecoms revolution in the country as it announced the successful completion of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) trial in Lagos, the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria.

LTE, widely accepted as the true 4G, is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals. It is based on advanced network technologies with a central focus of increasing the capacity and speed using a different radio interface together with enhanced core network.

With the successful completion of the first 4G LTE trial in Lagos, Airtel says it is ready for test in the other major cities across the country including Abuja and Port Harcourt.

The company added that the Lagos trial threw up exciting results as data users could open up simultaneous HD Videos on Youtube without buffering.  Download speed, under ideal conditions was 37 Mbps, while under non ideal conditions, was 32 Mbps; upload speed was 10.6 Mbps.

LTE is a truly global mobile phone standard for advanced mobile broadband. There is use of different frequency bands in different countries, which will mean that only multi-band phones will be able to use LTE in all countries where it is supported.

In February this year, Airtel Nigeria took a significant step to deepen its network capacity and quality when it announced the roll-out of widest 3.75G services across the 36 States in Nigeria and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

With the pan-Nigeria launch of 3.75G services, the widest and largest in the country, the company has improved customers’ experience with high speed mobile broadband and internet access, empowering telecoms consumers to watch live TV, download music, make video calls as well as send and receive emails using enabled devices.