MTN SA today achieved another milestone in Bloemfontein by commercializing its Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in the central region of South Africa.

LTE, which is making waves in South Africa’s mobile and telecommunications landscape, offers customers the fastest and most reliable wireless broadband Internet connection in South Africa with a host of benefits, such as social-economic development and promoting regional development that will enhance South Africa’s global competitiveness.

Data explosion is here to stay says Eben Albertyn, Chief Technology Officer at MTN SA. “Data traffic continues to grow exponentially, led by video and users want to be connected to content and friends, everywhere & always, expecting perfect quality, zero latency, and limitless speed with zero costs. MTN recognizes this and hence this unveil in this region.”

The new LTE network launched in Bloemfontein will provide MTN SA customers with an infrastructure, which is enabled to offer holistic multimedia solution at faster speeds and provide a better Internet experience, not only for consumers, but business at large.

Our LTE network will support education, socio economic upliftment and innovation within the central region of South Africa and will bridge the Digital Divide by bringing broadband to the peri-rural/under-served areas as well as bringing together mobility & high speed Internet access.

“As an innovative mobile technology company, we are absolutely thrilled with this feat achieved by our skilled resources that worked tirelessly to deliver LTE to the central region. This is in line with our strategy to maintain and increase our leadership position by being the first to market through bringing innovative technologies such as LTE to our customers,” says Albertyn.

MTN customers in the Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban regions are already benefitting from using MTN’s LTE network, progressively being extended to other cities and peri-rural areas.

This broadband evolution offers broadband speeds of up to 70mbps and consumers can expect speeds of between 7 and 20 Mbps on average, dependent on network conditions. MTN customers in central South Africa will now be able to browse Internet seamlessly, stream multimedia content and have a much faster mobile online experience. LTE enables MTN’s customers to access information, entertainment, applications and services with much more richness and computing capacity.

“The deployment of LTE in this region is part of MTN SA’s strategy to invest in better and faster networks, making our customers’ lives a whole lot brighter by providing them with technology that gives seamless experience. We have recently modernized most of our base stations in preparation for LTE and have re-farmed 2x 10MHz in 90% of our sites to provide faster connection speeds,” concludes Albertyn.

MTN’s street level coverage map that shows areas with MTN LTE coverage can be found on the MTN website - http://www.mtn.co.za/Travel/Pages/NationalCoverage.aspx.