Zain Saudi Arabia and Motorola ink LTE contract

Zain Saudi Arabia and Motorola have signed a contract to deploy the first Long Term Evolution (LTE) network in Saudi Arabia. Deployment will commence in the second quarter enabling Zain to offer high-speed 4G mobile broadband services to its subscribers.

Motorola will provide and end-to-end 4G solution including radio access network (RAN), evolved packet core (EPC), devices and optimisaton, and integration services. A FDD LTE network in the 2.6GHz band will be rolled out, overlaying Zain’s existing 3G network across the country.

"We want to provide Zain subscribers in the kingdom with the fastest high-quality network that can accommodate real-time multimedia applications such as video conferencing, high definition (HD) content streaming, video blogging, or the ability to quickly upload video onto social networking sites,” stated Ismail Fikree, chief operating officer of Zain Saudi Arabia. “With LTE, Zain customers will be able to experience unparalleled mobile broadband experiences.”

With the best performance and lowest cost per bit of any standards-based, cellular technology, LTE is expected to deliver throughput in excess of 100Mbps and 15ms roundtrip latency, to provide subscribers with a unique mobile broadband experience that is comparable or exceeding what they have at home today with fixed broadband connections. In addition, because of LTE’s lower cost per bit, it makes bandwidth-hungry applications more cost-effective for operators to deliver profitable mobile broadband to the mass market.