Techno-Economic Investigation of LTE-Advanced Deployment for Africa: Case of Addis Ababa City

Abstract

The proliferation of innovative data services and subsequent increase in mobile data traffic continues to be a prevailing trend across the globe. For instance, according to Ericsson, mobile data traffic is forecast to reach 71 Exabyte per month in 2022 from 8.8 Exabyte per month in 2016. Moreover, it is noted that Sub-Saharan Africa region including Ethiopia exhibit fastest growth rates in terms of mobile data demand. To accommodate this increasing demand, beside Long Term Evolution (LTE), mobile operators are optimizing their network and deploying LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) and LTE-A Pro technologies. Having operational LTE network in capital Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian incumbent sole operator ethio telecom is still at the early preparation phase of upgrading their network to include LTE-A capabilities. To that end, there is a need of understanding techno-economically viable LTE-A deployment scenarios to meet the local demand. In this paper, relevant LTE-A deployment scenarios are developed for Addis Ababa using the scenario-planning method considering the local context. To observe viability of the developed scenarios, we also perform techno-economic analysis using modified TERA model assuming 6 years study period and 10% discount rate. The findings of our study note that the net present value and payback period results show that LTE-A scenario that applies Progressive Deployment with Out-of-band small cells is the most viable scenario for Addis Ababa.