Ooredoo Qatar has deployed Nokia 4.5G Pro technology to increase mobile data speeds to up to 800 Mbps for its customers in some part of Doha, Qatar’s capital city.

Ooredoo Qatar is the first mobile operator in the Ooredoo Group, and one of the first telecom operators in the world, to launch 4.5G Pro services with Nokia.

The deployment of Nokia 4.5G Pro technology will enable Ooredoo to satisfy data demands of customers in Doha, including the Doha Corniche, Katara and West Bay areas as well as The Pearl-Qatar, an artificial island in Doha.

Technology on Nokia AirScale radio platform leverages two component carrier aggregation with 4×4 MIMO antenna technology and 256 QAM to deliver 800 Mbps speeds. Ooredoo plans to acquire new spectrum and incorporate additional carrier aggregation to enable Gigabit data speeds.

Nokia, in a demonstration of 4.9G technology at Mobile World Congress 2017, has showed how data speeds could be increased to 3 Gbps in the future. Nokia will commercially launch 4.9G technology toward the end of 2017. Mobile operators such as Ooredoo Qatar can use Nokia’s 4.9G technology to evolve networks on the path to 5G in future.

“Data traffic continues to grow across our network and working with Nokia we can leverage the higher speeds enabled by 4.5G Pro now – and further boost speeds in the future with 4.9G when it becomes commercially available – to satisfy these demands,” said Waleed Al-Sayed, chief executive officer of Ooredoo Qatar.