The Digicel (News - Alert) Group has mobile phone networks in 33 markets across the Caribbean, Central America and Oceania regions. Most of these developing countries don't have the necessary infrastructure to deliver next generation communications services for its consumers and organizations. In order to address this problem, Digicel has invested more than $5 billion globally to bring leading edge technologies to the markets in which the company operates. The new agreement the company has entered with ZTE (News - Alert) is going to expand 4G LTE networks across 26 markets in the Caribbean and Central America. With this infrastructure in place, Digicel can deliver high performance mobile broadband services to everyone across the region.
The new round of investment is part of the Digicel 2030 global transformation program, a promise by the company to provide next generation communications and entertainment services for its customers. According to the company, a more agile, customer-centric application of resource is going to be deployed to use the investment effectively throughout the markets the company covers.
The ZTE 4G LTE (News - Alert) deployment will include its Uni-RAN solution so Digicel can accomplish 2G/3G convergence, unified management and maintenance, resource sharing for different systems while lowering the total cost of ownership and saving over 30 percent of construction costs.
Using Multi-mode multi-frequency networking and software defined radio technology, Uni-RAN can make a single RF unit support multiple radio modes within the same frequency band. By integrating a multi-frequency-band and multi-mode network, the TCO for operators becomes much lower as different frequency band, multi-mode hybrid networking is achieved by sharing the same base band unit among several RF units.
According to ZTE, the base station's dimensions are minimized using a unified microTCA hardware platform to achieve high integrity and processing capacity for better performance. The result is to download data throughputs of 130 Mbps and upload of 35 Mbps for each BP board. This data rate can address future HSPA+/LTE networks while meeting the requirement of multi-mode networking.
As the pace of mobile network upgrades continues to increase, the time between new technologies is getting shorter and shorter. For Digicel and other operators, the ZTE Uni-RAN solution protects their current investments by cutting-down TCO and addressing all foreseeable primary needs for future technologies as mobile broadband accelerates the pace of network upgrades.
Once the Digicel Group finalizes the upgrade to its infrastructure, the 13 million customers it serves will have access to next generation communications.
Edited by Alicia Young