Telecom Lead Africa: MTN
Nigeria has tied up with Ericsson to deploy SSR 8020 platform for wireless
IP core network.
Ericsson said the SSR 8020 platform supports significantly
more subscribers from a single Evolved Packet Gateway (EPG) than competing
nodes on the market.
MTN Nigeria is the first African operator to deploy SSR
8020. Deployment will enable MTN meet rapidly increasing demand for data
services.
MTN will deploy the Evolved Packet Gateway on SSR 8020 by
the end of 2012.
This deal also includes deployment of the End-to-End Quality
of Service solution in order to offer more innovative mobile broadband
products.
MTN Nigeria will be able to serve subscribers’ growing data
needs, with the deployment of Ericsson’s latest wireless packet core
network technology. The Smart Services Router (SSR) 8020 platform is designed
to allow operators to introduce capabilities to enhance the mobile broadband
experience for end users.
“Deploying this platform will make our network more
efficient and scalable to cater for the growing data demands of our
subscribers,” said Lynda Saint-Nwafor, CTO of MTN Nigeria.
Nigeria has over 120 million mobile subscriptions.
Data traffic growth in Nigeria was
100 percent last year.
MTN has over 42 million subscribers.
The SSR has a backplane capacity of up to 16 Tbps, signaling
capacities, an easy-to-use administrative interface, and sophisticated
availability and resilience capabilities. The router will support the current
2G, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks of MTN Nigeria, plus will also be able to support future
upgrades to LTE.
Ericsson said the ability to support all the different types
of access networks brings significant cost savings to operators because fewer
nodes with high scalability can efficiently handle the network bandwidth
growth.
The EPG (Evolved Packet Gateway) application has the
capabilities to support 2G, 3G and 4G and the rapid increase in demand for
IP data services.
“The flexibility and capacity of the SSR platform will allow
MTN Nigeria to introduce newer, smarter functions and capabilities which will
enhance the mobile broadband experience for end users. This includes traffic
management capabilities for quality of service differentiation and improved
operator billing and rating options,” said Lars Linden, head of Ericsson
Sub-Saharan Africa.
