It's been active for a few weeks now, but BTL officially launched its 4G LTE Advanced service today. Now, if you're scratching your head like…but didn't they launch 4G exactly four years ago - on December 14, 2012? Well they did launch something called 4G - but that was actually more like 3.5 G HSPA. And so while the marketing people may have kind of rounded it off, this time you can believe the hype: the new 40 million dollar 4G LTE switch is at the cutting edge of global telecommunications. According to BTL and HAUWEI execs., this is the first 4G LTE Advanced switch in the region. The difference there is the word "ADVANCED" - and at the launch this morning we found out what it means:...
Nestor Vasquez, Chairman, BTL
"Here we are on the 16th day of December 2016 making good on our commitment to provide Belize with the most modern, reliable, advanced mobile network in the entire Caribbean and also in Central America. Because neither the Caribbean nor Central America has the 4G LTE Advanced, that's the difference."
Anwar Barrow, Chmn. Executive Committee, BTL
"Customers should expect a significant improvement in terms of voice, text and the fastest most reliable data service in the entire region. We are launching this network and there will be and there have been no increases in prices or more expensive plans for LTE customers. So for us, data is data and once you buy a data plan, the only limitation is having an LTE capable phone and a uSIM chip."
Benoit Coulumbe, Director of Services. Huawei
"This is a complete replacement of the previous networks so we've actually swapped out the whole network and we built the new network alongside the old network where we kept the old network running. Over a number of regions we cut over the new network and there were 5 regions. That was done all overnight, sort of transplanting without impact to subscribers. We're using 4G LTE Advanced technology for this network and one of the technologies is carrier aggregation. A  standard LTE network has different spectrums. Here in this network, we're taking multiple spectrum of LTE, combining them into one big LTE advanced pipe. What that does is a bigger pipe so much faster speeds, LTE Advanced will be much faster than regular LTE. Giving an example to get you to understand how advanced this is, Verizon in the U.S which is the largest operator just launched LTE Advanced with carrier aggregation in August this year, its only 4 months ago. The biggest US operator launched LTE Advance. It's a sign that this is very leading edge for BTL."
Anwar Barrow, Chmn. Executive Committee, BTL
"The project is still not complete but we are the only carrier in Belize with a nationwide 4G LTE network, much less an advanced network as we have. We're also committed to considerably expanding our footprint and reached under surf towns and villages across the country. In fact, in the first quarter of 2017, that is by March, we'll be installing an additional 11 new cell sites in places like Hope Creek, Hummingbird Community, Bella Vista Village, Jacinto Village, Franks Eddy United Village, Chan Chen, as well and some other sites in the Belize District to name a few. By the end of 2017 we would have added an additional 40 new cell sites to the already 100 cell sites that we have."
Notably, BTL will have to accelerate depreciation on the old phone switch they got rid of, which will affect the company's year-end profits.
The 8 new cell sites are in the city. BTL says it will set up 40 more by the end of 2017. But, most people don't care about all the fancy talk…they just want to know how fast will it be? During the testing phase we've consistently tracked download speeds of 30 MEGS and higher, but once everyone gets a U-SIM that should go down. They told us what to expect:..
Jules Vasquez, 7News
"What should be the consumers' expectations of the bandwidth? They can consistently expect when the system is fully loaded when most of the subscribers have their uSims?"
Benoit Coulumbe, Director of Services. Huawei
"When you talk about capacity or throughput there is a lot of parameters you have to look at; It's the time of the day you are doing it, the where you are, are you close to a base station? Far away from a base station? Are you at a BTL park and there's a thousand people around you? So there is many different parameters. So yes maybe on a late you are alone and you get a hundred meg, but during a peak hour. Typically in the US, I'll give you an example in the US typically users will get 10, 15, 20 megs on a fully loaded system for LTE."
And when more users start to get on the system and are doing VIDEO calls and facebook video uploads all day - will the system slow down and crash like the original 4G did when it got swamped? BTL says they have built the system to accommodate rapidly expanding consumer usage:
Anwar Barrow, Chmn. Executive Committee, BTL
"We expect that the amount of customers who are accessing data will continue to grow. We also expect that for existing customers the amount of data given the uptake in terms of the experience and what people are experiencing right now and will continue to experience will cause them to use more data. So we have sized this new network to accommodate that."
And while the data charges are the same for the LTE service, with the increased speeds users burn up a lot more data a lot faster.
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