Planned outages will affect 180 million Indonesian mobile customers as the 1.8 GHz frequencies now used to support second generation networks are reallocated for future fourth generation networks.
The reallocation involves 75 MHz of spectrum, affecting Telkomsel (22.5 MHz), XL (22.5 MHz), Indosat (20 MHz), and Hutchison 3 Indonesia (10 MHz).
The problem is that the frequency plan in Indonesia does not presently conform to global recommendations for Long Term Evolution networks.
In Indonesia the current allocated spectrum for 4G deployment is at 2.3 GHz, a band previously allocated for WiMAX services.
But existing mobile devices have not been built to deliver LTE on this frequency. If it were to use a non-standard frequency, Indonesia would not benefit from volume production of devices running on global standard frequencies.
The 700 MHz band presently is licensed only for broadcast TV, although the shift to digital TV broadcasting in 2017 eventually will free up that band for other purposes.
The 900-MHz bands already are used to support 2G and 3G connectivity by Indonesia’s top three mobile carriers (Indosat, XL Axiata, and Telkomsel).
Service providers generally try very hard to avoid intentional or planned outages caused by routine maintenance operations. Likewise, the reason new mobile network generations use new spectrum is that regulators and service providers know it is better to run new networks in parallel, to avoid disruption.
Sometimes, though, a planned series of outages is unavoidable. So it will be in Indonesia as second generation network spectrum in the 1.8 GHz band is reconfigured. The reconfiguration will affect all four national operators, and about 180 million customers.
No comments:
Post a Comment