The fabulous shock of high-speed tech
AFEW days ago, my phone delivered a terrible shock. Not that it was faulty — quite the contrary. Rather, it produced a performance I did not believe was possible.
Sitting in a random coffee shop in a nondescript suburb, I opened a phone app called Speedtest, as I habitually do in new locations. It tells you the speed of your uploads and downloads, as well as the ping time — how long it takes for a piece of data to travel from a device to the Speedtest servers and back.
I am accustomed to seeing download speeds ranging from a crawling 100 kilobytes per second (Kbps) to a fast seven megabytes per second (Mbps). On a rare occasion, it has gone as high as 15Mbps. I had seen much faster speeds on a laptop either connected to a Wi-Fi network or using an LTE modem.
LTE, for long-term evolution, is the next generation of mobile broadband designed to take 3G to 4G. Whereas 3G offers a maximum theoretical download speed of 21Mbps but typically connects at below half that speed, the version of LTE available in South Africa has a theoretical speed limit of 70Mbps.
Our LTE does not officially qualify as 4G, because it lacks a few elements contained in the fine print of the technical specifications. “Real” 4G takes the potential speed limit to 150Mbps and beyond.
In the real world, these speed limits are never reached because the signal deteriorates with distance, the number of users connected to the nearest base station and weather conditions.
To make matters worse, the radio frequency that is best suited to LTE has not yet been licensed by the regulator, Icasa, owing to foot-dragging by the minister of communications. As a result, the mobile network operators have to reassign radio spectrum intended for voice communications, resulting in both deteriorating voice quality and inadequate LTE.
All these were reasons that the number popping up on Speedtest came as a shock: 26Mbps.
It was a number that said, finally, LTE was real, even if it was not of the 70Mbps variety.
The connection came courtesy of Vodacom, which had just more than 600 LTE base stations operational at the end of March. CEO Shameel Joosub said recently that the company would continue to build on that base in 2013, but would not give specifics.
MTN is not far behind with 500 LTE sites live in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town.
According to Zunaid Bulbulia, the new CEO of MTN South Africa, it intends to get to 1 000 LTE sites by the end of the year and extend to more cities.
Cell C had only 100 LTE base stations up and running by April this year, but CEO Alan KnottCraig has also targeted 1 000 sites by the end of the year.
If base stations are the measure, the unlikely LTE leader is none of the above, but the much-maligned Telkom.
According to chief operating officer Brian Armstrong, it has 690 sites live. At a recent briefing, he put the number in a simple but ominous context for the competition: “We have the potential to leapfrog the others on mobile data. For us, data leadership on mobile is critical.”
Telkom has a strategic advantage that makes the LTE numbers seem puny: 16 500 fibre distribution points, which act as the break-out points for its massive countrywide network of high-speed fibre optic cables. Many of them could potentially provide the data feed to LTE towers and accelerate the rollout of mobile broadband.
The real dream is that, in the short term, LTE delivers a shock to every phone in the country.
Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editorin-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter on @art2gee