Blu Telecom to deepen 4G market

Blu Telecom, a licenced 4G network operator, is expected to launch its network by mid-October as it begins a 30-day trial exercise in some selected communities in the Greater Accra Region.

The trial process, which involves 100 customers that Blu Telecom has dubbed “founders”, is intended to test the network’s readiness before it goes commercial next month.

The Chief Commercial Officer, Tara Squire, explained to B&FT that the company has successfully laid down the necessary infrastructure required to launch the network and wants to allow some selected consumers to test it ahead of the launch.

“Over the last few months, we have steadily been preparing to launch the telecom service. We have the core network ready, we have the data centre ready, and our billing infrastructure is ready. We have some cell sites that we have put up.

“What we have done is have put out what we call the trial phase of our business. This phase will cover some parts of Tema, Spintex Road, East Legon and Dzowulu. The plan is that within the trial phase we want to ensure everything is working the way we want it to before we go into wider coverage as per the licence requirement,” he said.

Blu Telecom is one of the three fourth-generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) providers licenced by the National Communication Authority (NCA) to provide high-speed mobile broadband Internet services within the 4G range.

The NCA has set a November deadline for all the licenced operators to launch their services -- and the commercialisation of Blu Telecom’s network will be the second time in three months that a telecom network operator deploys 4G, one of the fastest Internet and data communication services ever in the country.

Mr. Squire explained that the company is on schedule to meet the regulator’s November deadline and wants to further gauge the consumer experience on the network in order to address any teething issues.

He said: “We have been working hard to ensure that we meet the deadline. We have raised money locally and we are almost through. A few days ago, we met 100 consumers who we call our founders. One of the key tenets of our business is that we want to be a customer advocate to ensure the experience that the customer has on our network is a splendid one.

“They will interact with us for the next 30 days and we will put the results together and share them with the regulator, as it are really interested in finding out what consumers think about our service.

“Our timetable is a simple one. Immediately we finish the testing, in a few days or couple of weeks after, we aim to launch. Once the 30 days is over, we would want to launch as quickly as possible. From a business perspective, we are ready. We have got the sales team, HR team; the call centre is ready, and marketing is already functioning. We have got everything ready.”

Licenced 4G operators are hoping to woo data consumers since the technology empowers people 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 unmatched in the market.

It is believed that Blu will put content and Video-On-Demand services at the core of its offerings with a speed of about 6 mbps (megabytes per second), which is above the current average speed of 512 kbps (kilobytes per second) in the market.

By Evans Boah-Mensah | B&FT Online | Ghana