Ericsson has announced an agreement with MTN to trial its new Ericsson Radio Dot System in public venues and enterprise buildings across South Africa and, later, across other MTN operations.
An in-building environment presents a special set of challenges for mobile operators, concerning complexity, scalability and service continuity. Current indoor solutions are built mainly for voice coverage and do not meet the growing
capacity demands of apps.
The Ericsson Radio Dot System was introduced to the African market at AfricaCom in November 2013. It is a cellular radio that is small enough to fit a person’s hand, but provides quality indoor coverage that previously required
complex in building instalment. The disk-shaped solution addresses a broad range of scenarios for providing high-quality access to mobile broadband indoors.
The MTN deployment will address indoor coverage and capacity needs of their individual and enterprise mobile broadband subscribers.
Fredrik Jejdling, head of Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa, says: “Our research predicts mobile data traffic will grow 17 times over the next five years driven by app culture and video. As such leading operators like MTN are focused on
improving indoor network performance and coverage.
“The Radio Dot System is a game changer, designed to empower mobile and converged operators to seamlessly deliver integrated cloud and mobile broadband services to their customers.”
The Ericsson Radio Dot System introduces an antenna element, or “dot,” which delivers mobile broadband access to users. Because of its convenient size, scalability, and evolution path, the Radio Dot System caters to both
business and consumer users in a broad range of enterprise buildings and public venues. The Ericsson Radio Dot System is fully integrated with the operators’ network.
Jyoti Desai, group chief technology and information officer at MTN, says: “Ericsson has enabled MTN to meet the needs of our customers by providing a high quality and consistent experience everywhere, while also extending MTN’s
brand promise to the enterprise segment which is one of our fastest growing segments.
“Ericsson’s Radio Dot System allows MTN to provide the business services and solutions that are expected of the leading operator in Africa and the Middle East.”
While Radio Dot System is primarily designed to meet rapidly-growing indoor data demands, it will improve coverage and capacity for existing voice services wherever it is deployed. It will also improve the support of upcoming voice
communication services, such as high-definition voice and voice over LTE (VoLTE).
