Ethio Telecom disclosed it will start giving a 4G service for its customers in Addis Ababa beginning from the coming month. With regard to the rest of the country, Ethio Telecom will commence rendering the service in the coming year. The announcement by the Telecom company was announced on Tuesday, August 5, 2014 during a press conference.

Ethio Telecom has been conducting a Telecom Expansion Project (TEP). It is following the completion of this project the company will start the 4G service.

TEP was conducted in three phases. The first phase was to replace the old Nokia network with a Huawei network. The second phase was network swapping of 239 areas in the capital.

The third phase of the TEP was to install 4G service for 400,000 customers. This was done by completing civil works, erecting antennas and installing service equipment in an additional 410 sites.

According to Fortune, in these sites there will be 210 antennas supporting 4G. Abdurahim Ahmed, corporate communications officer at Ethio Telecom, Addis Ababa has 722 antennas installed for the purpose of making the service coverage in the city reach 100 percent.

He furthered problems recently noticed when recharging accounts of mobiles or CDMAs will now be automatically detected. There is a technical team organized by Ethio Telecom and Huawei for the purpose of resolving the area, the officer added.

Out of the 410 new network antennas 210 of them will support 4G, Abdurahim said. In addition to this the antennas have generators and batteries to mitigate the power problem.

The downloading capacity of the 4G network is 150mbit/sec while 3G’s is 42mbit/sec.

According to Fortune, the new 4G service will be provided to smart phones with 4G capacities, which includes iPhone 5, Galaxy s5, and Nokia Lumina. Dongles, commonly known as EVDOs, also access this service.

Source: Fortune