11
All these claims seem to be just a PR battle aimed at confusing the uninitiated
Patel. “All these claims seem to be just a PR battle aimed at confusing the uniniti- ated. Without any real LTE offers available to customers at the time, none of the three had any legitimate claim to the short-lived prestige of being first to launch, and the PR battle seems to have been opportunism on the part of the operators.” By November 2011, though, LTE services
had officially launched in the region. Saudi’s Mobily announced that in the first phase of its rollout, it has launched its 4G LTE service in the cities of Najran, Jazan, Al Kharj, Ras Tanoura, Algurayat and Aldudamy, and revealed plans to follow this up by rolling the service out to Hail, Al Baha, Al Mujamaaa and Wadi Al Dawasir shortly after. The launch of STC’s LTE service was
announced by CEO Jameel Al Molhem who declared that the company was the first to launch the 3G services in the region in 2006, the first to upgrade its network to HSPA technology, and is now providing a “quantum leap in customer experience” with data transfer speeds reaching more than 100 Mbps. Meanwhile, Zain revealed that it had been
working with Motorola, Ericsson and Huawei to build what it says is the world’s largest LTE network in the country, in a project that began in February 2010. However, the LTE services that Saudi’s
operators have launched were not quite what they had initially hoped to bring to market. Problems with the allocation of LTE spectrum in Saudi Arabia mean that operators in the country cannot follow their preferred choice of launching FDD- LTE in the 2.6GHz band, as it is cur- rently being used by the military. Saudi’s operators have therefore launched TD-LTE services instead. Across the border in the UAE, incumbent
Etisalat’s CTO, Marwan Zawaydeh, said at Informa Telecoms and Media’s LTE MENA conference in Dubai this year that the firm was satisfied with its trials of LTE and that the market was ready for the technology. Sure enough, shortly after that, Etisalat launched its LTE service at the end of September. Its rival, Du, has so far said that it plans to roll out LTE nationwide by the end of the 2011. The firm has a deal in place with Nokia Siemens and Huawei for the rollout.
Middle East Market Review | November 2011 Qatar is trailing the UAE and Saudi, and
local operator Qtel claims that its LTE ser- vice is also imminent. The firm announced that it will deploy nearly 900 base stations across the country as part of a programme to provide ongoing improvements to mobile broadband internet services for customers in 4G coverage areas, and offer potential download speeds of as much as 150Mbps on mobile phones and devices. “Qtel continues to invest in the Broad-
band Qatar strategy, which aims to provide one of the fastest, most reliable broadband networks in the world to the people of Qatar,” said Waleed Al Sayed, Qtel’s COO in a recent statement to the press. “Following a comprehensive study of LTE technology, we are now positioned to build the largest 4G network in Qatar, offering the fastest speeds and most com- prehensive coverage.” He added that Qtel successfully carried
out a test phase for the technology with two potential vendors in July and the firm has received assurances that a full range of devices will be launched in Qatar over the next year. »
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