Huawei Partners With Angola’s Movicel to Deploy Africa’s First 4G Network

Angola’s Movicel has signed a commercial contract for LTE with Huawei. Under this contract, Movicel will deploy a LTE FDD 1.8 GHz network in province Cabinda, the most productive crude oil region in Angola. The network will be commercialized by the end of May this year making it Africa’s first commercial LTE FDD 1.8 GHz network.

According to its futuristic network developing blueprint, Movicel will provide mobile broadband services with a downlink speed of up to 100Mb/s across Angola, starting from the high-value and dense urban areas, such as the capital Luanda.

Movicel CEO, Yon Moreira da Silva Jnr, said that the focuses on offering astonishing data speed tor the population which will foster the economic inclusion of the young population through digital inclusion.

Mr. Andrew Ge, CEO of Huawei Angola and Mr. João Pedro Flecha de Lima, SVP of Huawei Brazil said:

“Movicel is doing its share to pave the future of Angola and Africa with this state-of-the-art communication infrastructure. It will remove the gap between Northern and Southern hemispheres networks. The joint effort of Huawei’s office in Angola and Brazil ensures the best resources to deploy this challenging and passionate project.”

Based on the actual customers and traffic map, Movicel adopted from Huawei an end-to-end SingleRAN convergent solution, including RAN (Radio Access Network), CN (Core Network), DBS (Distributed Base Station) and terminal devices. With the most advanced SDR (Software Defined Radio) technology, the network will simultaneously meet the subscribers’ demand for both voice and data under different technologies (GSM/UMTS/LTE) with even one single frequency band resource.

According to the latest Evolution to LTE report released on January 5, 2012 by GSA (the Global mobile Supplier Association), there are 49 commercial LTE networks launched globally and 23 of them are using Huawei’s end-to-end SingleRAN LTE solution.

According to reports, Angola has a 52% mobile phonee penetration and 12% internet penetration while fixed line penetration stands at 2%. Before being privatised, Movicel was a CDMA network. The has two subma