Adewale Olorundare, head of the solutions sales team for Starcomms in Nigeria, is set to speak at the LTE Africa conference in Cape Town, South Africa in July, and says the technology on the continent is hotting up.
“LTE deployment is gathering pace around the continent, driven by end-user demand for higher performance and operators’ desire to efficiently enable new applications. The spread of mobile coverage in Africa is moving at a fast pace and equally data penetration is on the rise,” said Olorundare, in an interview with the conference organisers.
He said further mobile operators are increasing their operations “wide and fast” because they understand this as the only way to penetrate the data market and consumers want a more faster efficient and reliable service.
Olorundare believes in order to make LTE more affordable to the African market, operators must ensure data plans are affordable for everyone and flexible.
“For example, an operator can offer mobile connectivity plans of different average throughputs [such as] 1 megabits per second (Mb/s), 3Mb/s or 5Mb/s and above, all at different prices.
“While the premium plans would help capture and maintain high-end customers [such as] enterprise users, the lower-data-rate plans will enable more affordable pricing, enabling wider adoption of mobile-broadband services,” said Olorundare.
Olorundare believes the African market is unique because people are willing to pay more for efficiency, reliability and a faster data connection.
LTE is expected to bring a number of services to Africa, such as Voice Over LTE (VoLTE), Internet Protocol (IP) based TV broadcasting, premium video on demand (VOD) and music on demand (MOD) services.
