Ghana's first LTE operator, Surfline Communications has announced a deal with Huawei earlier this month at the Mobile World Congress. The deal will cover the expansion of Surfline's network to other major cities in Ghana including Takoradi, Kumasi, Cape Coast, Tamale and Ho and includes all key municipalities within the country which is seeing an increasing number of data users. Once completed, the network will boast 700+ cell sites, making it one of the world's largest independent LTE networks, said Surfline.
The company said that Huawei emerged as the winning vendor for the expansion contract due in part to their success as a worldwide market leader on the frequency division duplex (FDD) technology. The USD40 million deal - as reported by allafrica.com - will also see Huawei providing deployment and managed services to Surfline.
Surfline, one of the three new operators in the country to be awarded LTE licenses, has earlier on worked with Alcatel-Lucent to commercially launch its 4G LTE service. Prior to that, Surfline was awarded the Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) licenses on the 2500 – 2690 MHz band by the National Communications Authority (NCA) of Ghana, along with another Operator, Goldkey. Apart from these two, the NCA also awarded BLU Telecoms, another Operator in the country, an unpaired configuration license, with all three players spending US$6million each for acquiring the licenses.
