News
Canadian operator to close down CDMA infrastructure next year, encourages customers to move to LTE.
SaskTel this week gave users of its CDMA network a one-year warning of its plans to close down its CDMA infrastructure.
It will close the network on 5 July 2017, "after which [date] CDMA devices will no longer function," the Canadian operator announced. It is in the process of migrating customers to its LTE infrastructure.
"As technology evolves, it becomes necessary to turn down older networks,” said SaskTel CEO Ron Styles, in a statement.
"By shutting down the CDMA network, we can repurpose spectrum so we can continue to add capacity to our 4G and 4G LTE network province-wide and resources can be refocused towards emerging technologies, products, and services," he said.
SaskTel moved to improve its LTE capabilities last summer with the acquisition of two blocks of AWS-1 spectrum from Wind Mobile.
"With these additional blocks we can deliver significantly more bandwidth and faster speeds," Styles said, at the time.
SaskTel, which provides mobile services to residents of Saskatchewan province and relies on roaming agreements for coverage elsewhere, stopped selling CDMA devices and contracts in March last year with a view to making sure that all contracts would be at an end by the shutdown date.
This week it noted that its roaming partners will likely start closing their CDMA infrastructure from the start of next year, adding that one has already announced its decision to stop operating a CDMA network from 31 January. The company did not name the partner, but local press reports recently claimed that Telus will stop offering its CDMA service from that date.
As a result, remaining customers could well be left without network coverage if they travel outside Saskatchewan in the first half of next year, SaskTel warned.
