Ghana’s first 4G LTE service goes live

Surfline Ghana, one of the three licensed 4G LTE telecom service companies in the country, will officially launch its commercial service Tuesday.

The service  which is expected to change the landscape of data services in the country, will initially cover only the Greater Accra Region, with plans of expanding to other regional capitals in the coming years.

Speaking exclusively to some selected media editors with special interest in IT reporting in Accra at the weekend, the Marketing Director of Surfline, Ms Rosy Fynn, said the launch of the service was expected to give users of data services in the region a different experience at competitive prices.

Ms Fynn said the 4G LTE network was designed to also boost the data experiences of users of 3G devices such as smartphones and tablets once they got connected to the Surfline network through Wi-Fi.

The Head of Planning at Surfline, Nana K. Aduhene, said theoretically, the speed levels on Surfline’s 4G LTE network was up to 100Mbps but practical speeds had recorded 80Mbps.

A practical check of download speeds on the Surfline network in front of the journalists showed 24.5Mbps, which is  extremely higher than the 2Mbsp to 2.4Mbps that some of the 3.75G networks in the country showed.

Nana Aduhene said the 4G LTE offered 10 micro-second latent (speed at which webpages load during browsing) and it had also got rid of jitters (layers and steps a command goes through before the webpage loads), so there was no or very negligible buffering.

Surfline devices

The Mi-Fi allows up to 10 devices to connect to the Surfline network to browse, do live streaming, download and or upload at very practically high speeds. The router also allows up to 30 devices to connect to the Surfline network at the same time.

The company will release 4G tablets, but no 4G phones yet because it is not yet ready to start voice services.

As a result of the absence of the jitters and low latent, users will not experience the kind of challenge they experience with 3G, where your reception signal is full and the data checker reads H+ and yet the speed is slow. 

Live streaming of music on 4G LTE takes only one second to buffer, as opposed to 10 seconds on 3G; and live video streaming also takes 1 second on 4G LTE but takes 25 seconds on 3G. Uploads take 1 second on 4G LTE but 25 seconds on 3G.