Kenya’s biggest mobile phone service provider, Safaricom is now testing 4G under the radar. With Zain now being sold for the 4th (or is it 3rd) time to the Indian mobile phone giants, focus seems to be on Safaricom to lead the market in terms of innovative products and services.
So what is this 4G fuss all about? 4G refers to the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. It is a successor to 3G and 2G standards. The nomenclature of the generations generally refers to a change in the fundamental nature of the service. The first was the move from analogue (1G) to digital (2G) transmission. This was followed by multi-media support, spread spectrum transmission and at least 200 kbit/s (3G) and now 4G, which refers to all IP packet switched networks, mobile ultra-broadband (gigabit speed) access and multi-carrier transmission. A 4G system is expected to provide a comprehensive and secure all-IP based solution where facilities such as IP telephony, ultra-broadband Internet access, gaming services and streamed multimedia may be provided to users. Now you can guess why government ministers are all of a sudden knowledgeable about BPOs, eLearning, eGovernment etc! A 4G cellular system must have target peak data rates of up to approximately 100 Mbit/s for high mobility such as mobile access and up to approximately 1 Gbit/s for low mobility such as nomadic/local wireless access, according to the ITU requirements. Scalable bandwidths up to at least 40 MHz should be provided (that is more than we will ever ask from the fibre optic operators, if Safaricom maintains the Ksh. 8 per megabit cost rate).
The world's first publicly available 4G service was opened in the two Scandinavian capitals Stockholm and Oslo on the 14 December 2009. Associated with this, the Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e-2005) mobile wireless broadband access (MWBA) standard is sometimes branded 4G, and offers peak data rates of 128 Mbit/s downlink and 56 Mbit/s uplink over 20 MHz wide channels.
Source: Wikipedia
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