An introduction to South African carriers

[Azimuth]

I thought I'd drop this here and not my base station thread since I can't get access to the BTS room.

 

In the grand scheme of things: macrocell, microcell, picocell...which is this?

 

I sit just below these ones. Dual omni antennas for MIMO?

 

The contractors doing the installation in 2013. The antennas were inactive for 6 months. The dual antennas are placed regularly to maintain full signal strength.

 

Fiber being prepped.

 

Tons of the stuff.

 

Note the not-so-visible warning label "no scrap value". This is because we have a rampant copper theft problem here. More often than not they cut the fiber too.

 

The hat antennas went live with FDD-LTE broadcast earlier this year. We now have full-signal LTE throughout the office, hallways, even the can.

 

This extended to the basement parkings not too long ago but predominantly for voice. I haven't really tested the 3G throughput down there.

 

I assume this is a signal amp of sorts.

 

Very neat install for a basement! Obviously there's nowhere to hide the cables.

 

This is now MTN's biggest LTE site on the African continent.

 

From outside:

 

 

 

Taking a coffee break.

 

This is all pretty progressive for SA. An absolute pleasure to have LTE during the day because the 3G contention means it is completely unusable.

 

One typically gets 50Mbps+ all day long!

[Deval]

When I first saw the DAS installation pictures, I swore someone was taking pictures of my office. We have a similar set up here with a MIMO LTE DAS carrying 1x (voice), EVDO, and LTE (both FDD and TDD).

[Deval]

Quoted you Robert but moved it here.

 

We have a government deadline of 2018, I think, to reach certain milestones in broadband. There was a huge push a couple years ago where they were laying fiber in every damn street I drove in. It's such a pity I wasn't into cellular back then, or I would've taken a boat load of photos.

 

FTTH, MSANs and LTE are all that matters here now. The former two have nothing to do with cellular of course. The race is now last mile and LTE site upgrades (typically 30Mbps sites are upgraded to 100Mbps).

 

So tell me: is LTE that side for mobile phone use only? No "fixed broadband" home use like here where a LTE CPE is pushed in instead of an ADSL router?

 

Because of limits on data in terms of total usage, 90% of LTE is used for mobile phones, although some companies are trialing fixed broadband solutions, Sprint included.

 

A lot of businesses use LTE as backup for their fixed wireline connections for failover purposes, and some use LTE routers as primary for small offices or temporary locations.

[bigmachine]

I recently traveled to South Africa for work.  I have to say I was very impressed by the coverage.  I was out in the middle of nowhere in KZN and still got great reception and data.

 

I brought my unlocked Sprint HTC One M7 and used a Vodacom SIM card.  It took me a few minutes to sort out the settings, but it was definitely cool to see something different than EVDO/EHRPD pop up on Signal Check Pro.