Africa’s biggest operator MTN Nigeria has said that it will deploy Ericsson’s latest wireless packet core network technology to boost its ability to serve subscribers and their growing data needs.

The Smart Services Router (SSR) 8020 platform allows operators to introduce newer, smarter functions and capabilities to enhance the mobile broadband experience for end users.

With over 120 million mobile subscriptions overall, Nigeria is the largest and one of the fastest growing telecoms market in Africa. Data traffic growth in Nigeria was 100percent last year and the demand for mobile broadband is not slowing down as internet services are becoming increasingly essential for more and more facets of people’s lives.   

MTN hosts over 42 million of those subscribers and is faced with the challenges of providing network capacity to cater for its growing subscriber base while improving network quality.

The SSR has a backplane capacity of up to 16 Tbps, state of the art signalling capacities, an easy-to-use administrative interface, and sophisticated availability and resilience capabilities. The router will support the current 2G, 3G, and Wi-Fi networks of MTN Nigeria, plus will also be able to support future upgrades to LTE. This ability to support all the different types of access networks brings significant cost savings to operators because fewer nodes with high scalability can efficiently handle the network bandwidth growth.

The EPG (Evolved Packet Gateway) application has the capabilities to support 2G, 3G and 4G and the rapid increase in demand for IP data services. This deal also includes deployment of the End-to-End Quality of Service solution in order to offer more innovative mobile broadband products.

Lynda Saint-Nwafor, CTO of MTN Nigeria, says: “Deploying this platform will make our network more efficient and scalable to cater for the growing data demands of our subscribers.”

Lars Linden, head of Ericsson Sub-Saharan Africa, says, “The flexibility and capacity of the SSR platform will allow MTN Nigeria to introduce newer, smarter functions and capabilities which will enhance the mobile broadband experience for end users.” This includes traffic management capabilities for quality of service differentiation and improved operator billing and rating options.

Ericsson service professionals will provide turnkey services including installation, integration and commissioning of the new SSR 8020 platform as well as support services.MTN will deploy the Evolved Packet Gateway on SSR 8020 by the end of 2012.