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Turkish mobile operator badges its new mobile offering as 4.5G.
Turkcell on Friday announced the launch of live 4G services.
The telco, which won LTE spectrum in multiple bands in August, said it is offering high-speed mobile services on its LTE-Advanced infrastructure in 81 city centres across Turkey.
Like a number of other telcos, Turkcell has branded its LTE-A service as 4.5G, but there remains some debate in the industry as to what actually constitutes the interim step between current 4G technologies and the as-yet undefined 5G standard.
In tests carried out last month, Turkcell’s 4.5G network achieved a download speed of 390 Mbps in the city of Samsun, and speeds of around the 350 Mbps mark in four other cities. Upload speeds came in at between 40 Mbps and 50 Mbps.
Equipment makers have their sights set on higher speeds for 4.5G technology though.
For Huawei, 4.5G will allow for speeds of up to 1 Gbps and latency of less than 10 milliseconds. The technology will be suited particularly to an increasing number of connected devices, rather than being geared towards the smartphone market, the vendor says.
Meanwhile, rival ZTE has shunned the term 4.5G, preferring instead to roll out what it terms pre-5G offerings. One of the first of these to market looks set to be massive MIMO, which it says will be in use later this year.
The Turkish state insisted on using the 4.5G badge when it allocated LTE spectrum last year though, doubtless in part due to president Tayyip Erdogan’s call a year ago for the country to skip the fourth generation of mobile technology and move straight from 3G to 5G.
Turkcell’s 4.5G announcement is pitched firmly at the smartphone market. It has set out a 10-point plan covering its service to consumers, including offering larger data bundles for a promotional period, allowing customers to use their existing packages while roaming, and providing flexible payment plans for devices.
The announcement did not include full pricing details, but Turkcell said it will provide "significantly higher data quotas for a fractional increase in rates."
