Digicel goes 4G

[Exile]

BY AL EDWARDS
Thursday, September 03, 2009
MOBILE phone service provider Digicel (Jamaica) yesterday announced that it will be offering 4G broadband service in Jamaica as of next year, having secured a licence in the 2.5Ghz spectrum for the deployment of wireless broadband services.
This now means that Digicel will roll out 4G WiMAX services allowing customers to utilise megabit per second personal wireless broadband with speeds significantly faster than current 3G offerings. The other major mobile telephone service providers in Jamaica, namely LIME and Claro, currently offer 3G services.
Group Director of Digicel Broadband, Magnus Johansson (left), and Digicel (Jamaica) CEO Mark Linehan show off how its 4G technology will work with laptop computers at a press conference held yesterday at the Terra Nova Hotel in St Andrew. (Photo: Karl McLarty)
Mobile WiMAX is a standards-based technology that will turn cities and towns in Jamaica into giant Internet hotspots, allowing subscribers to receive faster and reliable broadband Internet services. Digicel paid US$1.2 million for its 4G licence and will invest US$22.7 million in the first year of its WiMAX project. The service will be launched through a new division of the company called Digicel Broadband headed by Magnus Johansson.
Set to launch in the second quarter of 2010, Digicel Broadband will initially cover 60 per cent of the population with coverage in all 14 parishes. Work on Digicel's 4G network, in the meanwhile, is expected to begin this month with further roll-out continuing across Jamaica later in the year.
Speaking at the press conference at the Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston yesterday to announce its 4G technology offerings, Digicel (Jamaica) CEO Mark Linehan promised to "shake things up" in the industry.
"Only eight years ago, Digicel entered the mobile market in Jamaica and turned it on its head. Today we have two million customers benefiting from the best service and the best value available. We want to do to broadband what we did to mobile in Jamaica. Customers will be able to experience the multiple benefits of 4G technology in termsof flexibility, affordability, coverage, bandwidth and security," he explained.
"We have had phenomenal demand for our personal WiMAX services in the Cayman Islands and have had huge success with our corporate fixed WiMAX solution here in Jamaica. Digicel is bringing 4G to Jamaica and it is going to be fantastic," he added.

[Don1]

BY AL EDWARDS
Thursday, September 03, 2009
MOBILE phone service provider Digicel (Jamaica) yesterday announced that it will be offering 4G broadband service in Jamaica as of next year, having secured a licence in the 2.5Ghz spectrum for the deployment of wireless broadband services.
This now means that Digicel will roll out 4G WiMAX services allowing customers to utilise megabit per second personal wireless broadband with speeds significantly faster than current 3G offerings. The other major mobile telephone service providers in Jamaica, namely LIME and Claro, currently offer 3G services.
Group Director of Digicel Broadband, Magnus Johansson (left), and Digicel (Jamaica) CEO Mark Linehan show off how its 4G technology will work with laptop computers at a press conference held yesterday at the Terra Nova Hotel in St Andrew. (Photo: Karl McLarty)
Mobile WiMAX is a standards-based technology that will turn cities and towns in Jamaica into giant Internet hotspots, allowing subscribers to receive faster and reliable broadband Internet services. Digicel paid US$1.2 million for its 4G licence and will invest US$22.7 million in the first year of its WiMAX project. The service will be launched through a new division of the company called Digicel Broadband headed by Magnus Johansson.
Set to launch in the second quarter of 2010, Digicel Broadband will initially cover 60 per cent of the population with coverage in all 14 parishes. Work on Digicel's 4G network, in the meanwhile, is expected to begin this month with further roll-out continuing across Jamaica later in the year.
Speaking at the press conference at the Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston yesterday to announce its 4G technology offerings, Digicel (Jamaica) CEO Mark Linehan promised to "shake things up" in the industry.
"Only eight years ago, Digicel entered the mobile market in Jamaica and turned it on its head. Today we have two million customers benefiting from the best service and the best value available. We want to do to broadband what we did to mobile in Jamaica. Customers will be able to experience the multiple benefits of 4G technology in termsof flexibility, affordability, coverage, bandwidth and security," he explained.
"We have had phenomenal demand for our personal WiMAX services in the Cayman Islands and have had huge success with our corporate fixed WiMAX solution here in Jamaica. Digicel is bringing 4G to Jamaica and it is going to be fantastic," he added.

competition is good... nuff gyal, cyar an cellie..

....but wi chat tuh much...one of the highest rates of telephone talk time in the world.

[Shola]

this doenst make sense, the standard for 4G has not been finished developed as yet and from my understanding wimax is different from 4g technology

[Shola]

WiMAX Not Really 4G: Ericsson CTO

By Om Malik | Wednesday, August 12, 2009 | 6:15 AM PT | 19 comments
Hakan Eriksson, chief technology officer of Stockholm, Sweden-based telecom equipment giant Ericsson, doesn’t much care for WiMAX. He doesn’t even think of it as a real 4G wireless technology — though to be fair, since the ITU hasn’t actually set the standard yet, there are no real 4G technologies. “They are four years late so they have to call it 4G,” Eriksson said of the telecom standards organization during a conversation with me earlier today. He proceeded to run down the reasons why he feels 4G isn’t a true wireless technology — all while laying the smack down on WiMAX.”There are 400 million people using 3G (HSDPA/WCDMA) technologies today,” he said. “There will be 70 million people using WiMAX in five years.” And by then, of course, Long Term Evolution (LTE), the 4G wireless technology, will be the de facto standard thanks to the patronage of large phone companies such as Verizon, Vodafone and AT&T, Ericsson hopes.

LTE Everywhere

As a result of its sheer scale, LTE will always have a price advantage — and such costs savings will be passed onto devices that utilize the technology. Eriksson drew a comparison to India, where GSM-enabled handsets enjoy a price advantage over their CDMA counterparts. “It will be the same for LTE and WiMAX,” he said. “In the end it will be about the economies of scale.”
LTE, according to Eriksson, is going to have a profound impact on our perception of mobile broadband, noting candidly that most of us in Silicon Valley don’t even enjoy true 3G speeds because our backhaul networks aren’t up to snuff. If we did have more bandwidth, he said, we’d be able to experience the true promise of 3G, which in turn would make us all rethink the possibilities offered by this new mobile broadband platform.
As Dr. Jan Uddenfeldt, SVP and senior adviser of technology to Ericsson’s CEO, pointed out, LTE will eventually move towards 100 Mbps. At those speeds, wireless broadband will start to compete with wired connections, especially that use DSL technology. According to Ericsson’s estimates we should start to see commercial deployments of the technology sometime next year, By 2012, the company expects LTE to be everywhere.

Devices, and the Apps That Run on Them

When we started talking about devices, Eriksson said the next generation of devices would be data-centric — likely a cross between an iPhone and a netbook — with an emphasis on browsing and multimedia technologies. “I think there are a lot of devices that do voice very well, and LTE is all about data,” he said.
Personally, I don’t believe that netbooks are a viable device option for the coming mobile broadband tsunami. So I’m glad to hear the Ericsson team articulate a bigger vision, one that includes specialized devices that leverage these new, super-speedy networks.
The need for such a devices adds credibility to the possibility of a larger-sized iPhone or iPod Touch. As I’ve noted before, if there was ever going to be a relationship between Apple and Verizon, it would have to revolve be around LTE-based devices. Verizon is spending shiploads of cash to build out its 4G network, and it would need something like an Apple tablet on which to run it.
This will present a big opportunity for Silicon Valley companies, Eriksson said, to build richer, more engaging Internet applications and adapt them for mobile broadband platforms. “I hope we see web browsers that are more capable and standardized to do better video and better gaming,” Eriksson said.
And in order for that to happen, he has Dr. Uddenfeldt based here in Silicon Valley. The company just opened a new division headquartered in San Jose that’s dedicated to IP & broadband solutions, with R&D that’s focused on mobile broadband and Internet convergence. Ericsson, which recently acquired the CDMA/LTE assets of Nortel for $1.13 billion, is slowly increasing its North American presence and today employs about 14,000 in this continent vs. 19,000 in Sweden. This new facility in what is the heart of Silicon Valley is a recognition of the fact that the U.S., after being left on the sidelines, is slowly moving to center stage when it comes to next-generation mobile and the mobile Internet.


http://gigaom.com/2009/08/12/wimax-n...-ericsson-cto/

[Mosiah]

Some phone company in the US is already pushing their 4G technology. Verizon?

[Shola]

Some phone company in the US is already pushing their 4G technology. Verizon?

Mosiah, it was just a test! So this this leads me to ask the question, is Digicel falsely advertising this technology.

August 14, 2009 2:01 PM PDT
Verizon completes initial 4G wireless test

by Marguerite Reardon

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Verizon Wireless announced Friday that it has completed initial testing of its 4G wireless service in Boston and Seattle.
Using a new technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE), Verizon was successfully able to complete data calls in Boston and Seattle, the first two cities where the company will deploy its service. Verizon is using the 700 MHz spectrum it bought an FCC auction to build the network. The company plans to start offering the service commercially in 2010, providing service for up to 100 million people in 30 markets. The company plans to have the entire nation covered with 4G service in 2013.
As part of this initial test, Boston and Seattle each have 10 LTE 4G cell sites up and running on the 700 MHz spectrum. Verizon selected these markets because of their geographic configuration of suburban and urban areas as well as the areas' high-technology population.
The LTE technology promises to be much faster than current 3G technology and the company expects to deliver services 15 to 100 times faster than these other wireless networks. The actual speeds of the technology have yet to be seen.
Verizon will be competing with Clearwire and its partners, which are already rolling out commercial service for their 4G wireless network that uses a technology called WiMax. Like LTE, WiMax also greatly improves wireless transmission speeds. Clearwire has already launched its service in Atlanta, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Portland, Ore. And it will add another 10 markets in the next couple of months.
Cable providers Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which invested in Clearwire, will be reselling the service in their cable territories. Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel, which is also a Clearwire partner, is already reselling the service along with its own 3G wireless service throughout the Clearwire territory.
Verizon first mentioned Boston and Seattle as the first two cities to get LTE during its quarterly conference call with investors in July. So far, the company hasn't said much about how the LTE service will be sold and priced. Currently, Verizon offers 3G wireless using a technology called EV-DO. That service is about $60 per month for up to 5GB of data per month.
The Clear WiMax service from Clearwire starts at $20 per month for in-home wireless broadband. And its mobile Internet plans start at $40 per month. Customers can also get a day pass for $10. The company also allows customers to add voice service to their in-home package for $25 per month.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10310232-94.html

[Mosiah]

The LTE technology promises to be much faster than current 3G technology and the company expects to deliver services 15 to 100 times faster than these other wireless networks. The actual speeds of the technology have yet to be seen.

I don't have the patience to explore what is real, lie, or great advertising. Digicel is obviously feeling the heat from its old GSM system.

But tell me, if these systems can deliver services 15 to 100 times faster, does that mean we can now talk faster on our phones? Do we have to be able to listen faster too? 100 times faster?

Thanks!

[Shola]

I don't have the patience to explore what is real, lie, or great advertising. Digicel is obviously feeling the heat from its old GSM system.

But tell me, if these systems can deliver services 15 to 100 times faster, does that mean we can now talk faster on our phones? Do we have to be able to listen faster too? 100 times faster?

Thanks!

lol i think they meant data transmission speeds.

[Mosiah]

oh! I knew that! heh heh!

[Gamma]

den who yuh think wi a chat tuh? di gyal dem and di mechanic fi fix di cyar dem!

[Mosiah]

...and now we can do it 100 times faster!

YAY!