MTN says 900MHz is enough

Johannesburg, 19 Oct 2001

Cellular operator MTN says congestion on its network has decreased by 50% to 0.35% in the last 20 months and the dropped call rate it experiences has decreased to 1.5%, a decline of 20%.

The company says optimising its use of the 900MHz frequency spectrum on its network had led to the increase in quality. It had also introduced technologies such as dynamic half rate allocation to handle congestion.

"Currently only one call in every 285 on the network will potentially be blocked by congestion," says Hilton Goodhead, MTN`s national manager for network planning.

As an example, MTN points to 11 September, when after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, its network traffic increased by 20% without any adverse effects.

Yet in early 2000 both MTN and Vodacom said the quality of their service would quickly deteriorate if they were not granted access to the 1800MHz frequency spectrum. The companies told the Independent Communications Authority of SA (ICASA) that in metropolitan areas such as Johannesburg and Cape Town it had run out of bandwidth and that calls by subscribers would likely increasingly be dropped.

ICASA suggested that means existed which would allow the operators to further increase the number of calls they could carry on allocated frequencies, but the operators countered that they had done all that was economically feasible.

"We are getting to the point where we have made the necessary trade-offs [with quality] and need additional spectrum very soon," Shane Hibbard, then acting GM of MTN, told ICASA in March 2000.

Throughout the battle for access to 1800MHz, both operators insisted that their need was for bandwidth to carry voice traffic. However, 1800MHz is capable of data throughput rates nearly double that of the currently used 900MHz and is seen as an enabler of mobile data services.

Even at the time analysts were predicting that data traffic would in future make up 80% of the revenues for mobile operators.

The Telecommunications Amendment Bill currently under discussion by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications grants both operators, as well as Cell C, Telkom and future operators, access to 1800MHz.