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August 8, 2017
SHENZHEN, China -- Huawei and Imagine Communications Group have announced the formation of a strategic partnership which will witness Ireland become the first country to benefit from the deployment of a pioneering national wireless-to the-x (WTTx) network.
Using the latest released LTE technologies optimised as a purely fixed access network, Imagine will use Huawei’s (WTTx) solution to deliver Superfast Broadband (200Mbps plus) connectivity across Ireland, removing the digital divide between urban and rural areas.
With the latest 4.5G technologies (such as Massive MIMO and Massive Carrier Aggregation), capable of a downlink speed of over 1Gbps and providing a roadmap to 5G, using high performance Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) to connect premises to fiber at a mast is faster to deploy with significantly lower cost comparing to fiber access solutions. WTTx is emerging as a key strategic alternative to FTTx accelerating the delivery of 100% high speed broadband availability.
Ireland is a country with a huge contrast between urban and rural areas in term of network infrastructure. While in urban areas cable availability provides an alternative to the limited fiber-to-the-x (FTTx) experience, it rarely meets the advertised headline speeds of up to 100Mbps, and cannot meet the demand for higher speed 100Mbps plus services. In fact for 61% of the market in regional and rural areas, x digital subscriber line (xDSL) services are as slow as 3 Mbps.
Ireland initiated a national broadband plan in 2012 to make 30Mbps broadband services available to every home by 2020. With fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) as the only alternative until now, the challenges and high cost of the deployment of the planned rollout of FTTP services by commercial operators have yet materialized, with only 12 thousand premises connected.
In a limited commercial trial of Imagine LTE fixed wireless access network in selected rural areas with a 70Mbps service, in less than a year 16,000 customers have already been connected with over 100,000 customers applying for the service. With the 3.6GHz 5G licenses secured in the recent spectrum award (May 2017), outside of limited urban areas where high speed broadband using cable is available, Imagine will be the first operator to provide Superfast 100Mbps plus services to the rest of the market. Imagine will commence the rollout of its network in October with the objective of 85% market coverage by 2019.
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
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