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The agreement between the two companies covers the deployment of new LTE sites and Ericsson’s home subscriber servers (HSS) for user data management.
According to Ericsson, it is also expected to facilitate the integration of LTE functionality into the existing provisioning and charging systems, as well as an upgrade of the core network to a triple-access evolved packet core that simultaneously carries GSM, WCDMA and LTE traffic.
Unitel’s chief executive officer Miguel Martins explained that Ericsson is also responsible for the design, implementation and initial tuning of the LTE network.
“The recent launch of Unitel’s 4G LTE network powered by Ericsson demonstrates our commitment to providing our customers with the highest standard and state of the art mobile broadband services,” Miguel said.
The company, which launched its LTE service in December last year, has said that LTE will help it introduce faster mobile broadband speeds, meet the increasing demand for data-driven services and give Unitel “the ability to offer its 8.8 million customers the most innovative services available in the market”.
Ericsson said the deal reaffirms that it is the market leader in telecommunication technology and services in the region, with over 40 percent of the world’s mobile telecommunication services going through its infrastructure.
“This deal reaffirms Ericsson’s leadership in LTE and further extends our long-standing relationship with Unitel. The new LTE network will facilitate Unitel’s continued delivery of superior connectivity, services and capabilities to their customers,” Lars Lindén, Ericsson’s head of Region Sub-Saharan Africa, said.
