Surfline Communication Ghana has begun its commercial operations with a pledge to change the local Internet industry by providing what could be the fastest Internet and data communication services ever seen in the country.
The launch of Surfline’s commercial operations in Accra on Tuesday makes the wholly-owned Ghanaian firm the first company to deploy fourth-generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) services, reported to be the biggest in Africa.
Ghana thus becomes the 13th country in Africa that allows telecom operators to roll out commercial LTE services in urban areas, and makes Surfline the newest member to join a select group of African operators slowly bringing LTE to the continent's major metropolitan areas.
The CEO of Surfline, Dr. Yaw Akoto, explained operations of the company will centre on providing unrivalled data communication services to customers that have need for speed and continuous connectivity.
“We want to provide LTE-based services that will outperform existing telcos. Not only is Surfline the first to pioneer the 4G LTE network in Ghana that will deliver Internet speeds that are up to 10 times faster than anything on the Ghanaian market today, Surfline has the largest one-time deployment of the 4G LTE network in Africa.
“We see a Ghana where people and business experience a true mobile broadband. Today, Ghana joins the ranks of 4G LTE players in the world. That means Surfline will be able to deliver greater speed, capacity; better quality and reliability than any network in Ghana, as well as unparalleled customer experience.
“It is about time that you saw a massive difference in any activity involving real-time data transfer -- like sending and receiving very large documents, video conferencing, live streaming, video chat and calling, etc.
“There is definitely a need for speed in the market,†he said.
Surfline -- established in 2011 -- is one of the 4G LTE providers licenced by the National Communication Authority at a combined fee of US$18million to enable them provide high-speed mobile broadband Internet services within the 4G range.
4G LTE empowers customers with compatible devices to surf the Web, post status updates and photos, download files, play games, and watch videos (or live-streams) wirelessly at speeds up to 10 times faster than customers on 3G networks.
The launch of Surline’s commercial operation will be limited to clients in the Greater Accra Region, which has a population of about 4.5 million.
Surfline started testing its 4G LTE network in June this year in an attempt to shape customer experience before the commercial launch.
According to the Marketing Director, Rosy Fynn, feedback the company has so far received from the trial period has shown that the company is on course to win over data customers and meet the emergent and largely unfulfilled data needs of businesses, government agencies, professional communities and residential users.
She said the company has so far made significant investments into its operations to enable it tackle the challenges of network congestion, lack of coverage, and scarcity of bandwidth.
She explained that Surfline’s sole concentration on data provision has given the company a technological leap to deliver seamless Internet services to consumers in a way that will allow it to stream large amounts of data over already-jammed cellular networks.
Mrs. Fynn, who was once a marketing executive of one of the biggest cellular network operators, said latency -- which measures how much time it takes for a packet of data to get from one point to another, and jitters -- layers and steps a command goes through before the webpage loads -- are significantly low in the new generation 4G LTE technology, which is expected to boost customer experience and attract data-hungry clients to the network.
Currently, there are more than 100 licenced Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country -- in addition to the six mobile network operators that are all offering data services at a price that is seen by many ISPs as anti-competitive.
With the GSM Association (GSMA) predicting that mobile networks in sub-Saharan Africa could experience a 25-fold increase in traffic in the next four years, the LTE standard could have a vital role to play in meeting burgeoning demand for mobile data services in way that allows customers to interact with the world via next-generation apps, devices and solutions.
However, data consumers should not expect 4G LTE services to be cheaper than the current market price of data.
By Evans Boah-Mensah | B&FT Online | Ghana
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