With a predominant focus on 5G RedCap, 5G Massive IoT, and 4G LTE Cat-1bis modules, the forthcoming shipments are anticipated to culminate in a substantial 5,4-billion cellular IoT connections (installed base) by the year 2030.

This paradigm shift underscores the evolving landscape and increasing prominence of advanced cellular connectivity solutions.

The research also found that mass adoption of 5G RedCap is set to commence from 2024 onward with the technology establishing itself as a mid-tier connectivity solution for 5G devices that do not require such high specifications as Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (uRLLC) and Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB).

It will also enable futureproofing of devices as the industry anticipates the eventual phase-out of 4G beyond the year 2030.

“2024 will be a pivotal year for 5G RedCap growth,” says Alexander Thompson, senior analyst for IoT at Omdia.

“This will begin in China where most volume is expected and, in due course, subsidies will bring the module Average Selling Price (ASP) down to similar pricing as LTE Cat-1.”

The forecast also finds that over 60% of IoT module shipments will come from the Asian & Oceania region, making up approximately 80% of IoT connections in 2023.

Notably, the automotive sector emerges as a key driver and is set to see the largest number of module shipments due to the growing demand for smart vehicles integrating 5G connectivity.

“Across the IoT value chain, Application Enablement Platforms (AEPs) continues to be the Andrew Brown, practice lead for Omdia’s IoT group. “There releading revenue generator,” says mains a role for industry specific/ pure-play AEPs despite the exponential growth of hyperscaler offerings and financial constraints for startups in the current economy.”

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The first deployment of LTE in Nigeria was in 2014 by Smile Telecom in Ibadan.

By 2016, Ntel, Bitflux and Smile had initiated efforts to deploy LTE in Lagos. Shortly after, the major national MNOs joined the effort.

By 2018, all of the four major network operators had LTE footprint in substantial parts of the country. This year has only seen increased 4G LTE coverage in Nigeria.

During the fourth quarter of this year, MTN began offering commercial 5G service using, primarily, its own routers.

“Unfortunately, unlike 2G and 3G networks, the regulatory body, NCC, has not established KPIs for monitoring the quality of the 4G networks or documented significant efforts made to encourage ongoing maintenance of high quality for these networks”, Enextgen Wireless Limited lamented in this report.

“The impact of efforts being made to minimize vandalism and improve the quality of public infrastructure can only be appreciated through ongoing monitoring. This is important because mobile broadband is indispensable to a vast majority of small enterprises and ordinary residents of the country.

“We have been carrying on the responsibility of monitoring these networks since 2016. We have evolved our process to where we now have a unique platform for not only monitoring the networks but also facilitating the efforts of interested network operators to maintain the best networks possible, a unique asset not available to other network operators in other countries”.

The 2022 4G LTE Spectrum Utilization Efficiency by MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9Mobile report focuses on benchmarking the quality of 4G LTE networks in Lagos and Ibadan – cities where Enextgen Wireless engineers have most consistently collected data in all four major networks.

“However, we have data in substantial parts of the country on MTN and one or two other networks, including data from some of the remote areas”.

The report available to TechEconomy uses data from the company’s Enterprise EMETRICS, which is available, by subscription, to interested MNOs, to rank the four network operators according to the quality of 4G LTE signal and packet delays:

Overview:

In the following pages, Enextgen Wireless ranked the quality of mobile RF signal used to provide 4G LTE services by the four major network operators in Lagos and Ibadan

“We base the rankings for EMETRICS according to the ratio of (green + blue + yellow) METRICS bins to (green + blue + yellow) RSRP bins.

“We base the ranking for Latency on the ratio of (green + blue + yellow) Latency bins to the overall latency bins (green, blue, yellow, brown, red)”, the report reads.

In each case, the one with the highest quotient ranks the highest:

What was the experience like? Well, let’s see how Enextgen’s Wireless’ 4G LTE RF quality analysis of Lagos to Enugu in May 31, 2022 will help us understand better why the quality of connectivity fluctuates.

In the report available to TechEconomy.ng, a team of engineers from Enextgen Wireless collected UE log between Lagos and Enugu and found that most cities and towns along the route have LTE coverage.

“Using our PREMETRICS, we identified the coverage quality ranking of bins with very high RF coverage (no less than -80 dBm). Those bins have a rating of Excellent (Green) in our RF coverage (RSRP) ranking.

“Ideally, they would also have a rating of Excellent (Green) in our RF Quality ranking. Any of the bins with lower than Green rating can use additional RF optimization.

“The amount of effort expended is for the MNO to decide

“PREMETRICS makes the available choices clear. Bins with Yellow and Saddle Brown (Fair and Usable) ratings show worse RF quality than the signal strength allows

“This demonstrates how the platform can be used to prioritize areas to focus on for immediate action.

“The coverage quality in Calabar, though not awful, could be improved as it contains a lot of Yellow and Saddle Brown bins.

“The higher the quality, the higher the amount of data that can be pushed through every second and the higher the revenue opportunity for the service provider”, the company said.

UE experienced higher packet latencies when the it was in WCDMA instead of LTE

The UE spent more time in 4G LTE than 3G WCDMA along the route.

What is PREMETRICS?

Enextgen Wireless described PREMETRICS  as proprietary platform for collecting, analyzing and creating reports for measurements from qualified Android-based mobile devices.

TechEconomy.ng understands this can be used for:

• Relating Radio Frequency events to causes
  • Trending selected KPIs
  • Pre-launch RF coverage optimization
  • Ongoing RF coverage quality monitoring and enhancement
  • Profiling quality of 4G LTE coverage
  • Profiling throughput and latency

“These bins have very strong RF coverage. Our EMETRICS shows the quality of that coverage.

“As seen below, the quality of the RF coverage varies. It is primarily determined by the quality of the RF Optimization effort.

“The purpose of RF Optimization should be to bring RF signal quality more in line with the RF signal strength, in order to improve customer satisfaction, and revenue generation, through higher offered throughput that is made possible by increased RF quality. Ideally, the signal strength in each of these bins should lead to Excellent (green) Quality. Instead, the quality of some of the bins is as low as Useable (marginal or Saddle Brown)”.

“Average RSRP was not less than –80 dBm in any of these bins. In other words, RF coverage was excellent in all of the bins.

“As such, EMETRICS ranking for the bins should also be Excellent (green). That none of them is green is an indication of a need for additional RF quality improvement. High RF quality results in additional revenue and increased customer satisfaction.

“The decision to make additional RF Optimization efforts may be guided by the MNO’s classification of the importance of the area to its bottom line.

“However, reduction in the number of Fair or Usable bins should come with the most basic level of RF Optimization.

Platform for LTE and 5G RF quality measurement, reporting and enhancement

Enextlog is a unique, low-cost tool for reporting measurements needed by our platform (PREMETRICS) for analyzing the quality of LTE and 5G networks

N100,00 (100 thousand naira) for installation on up to 10 devices.

Reports from logged measurements are available here (for public view) and there (for MNO subscriber view).

Uses for Enextlog:

• As probes at key customer locations
  • Logging RF measurements for RF optimization
  • Benchmarking against competitors
  • Resolving customer complaints
  • Monitoring impacts of network configuration changes.
  • Verifying the quality of cell site installations and antenna cabling.
  • Accepting individual cell sites, clusters of cell sites and entire market based on agreed-upon quality criteria.
  • Making network quality visible as a way to encourage continued quality improvement. It is difficult to improve what is not measured.

The four largest MNOs in Nigeria are MTN Nigeria, Globacom, Airtel Nigeria, and 9mobile. And the report about the quality of LTE networks in Nigeria is coming on the heels of a report by TechEconomy.ng on top 20 ISPs in Nigeria. Incidentally, some of the ISPs functions are internet service resellers for the large MNOs.

The importance of independent monitoring

“We cannot continue to depend on government for things we can do for ourselves, when it is obvious that the government is very busy.

Unbelievable as it may seem, our ancestors existed within the borders of Nigeria before the first British person stepped foot on this land. In other words, we owned the land.

Now, we have our interaction with the British and 20/20 hindsight to thank for reminding us that we were one people for whom it is never too late.

We have given up a lot. In return, we have received only the type of comfort that numbs the pain of giving up self-worth.

We are now left with no choice but to rely on a system created to denigrate our value and deny us reverence for our ancestry. This affects us all.

The only solution is to learn to look after one another. We cannot blame the government for making us sick when we wait for its permission to breathe despite having access to free air.

These words summed up the feelings of experts at Enextgen Wireless following their discoveries overtime on the quality of 4G LTE deployed by the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) in Nigeria.

The experts’ verdict is that the quality of LTE networks in Nigeria is not good. They will tell you why:

According to latest report by Enextgen Wireless, the situation gets worse in areas where it is needed the most.

“We have monitored it since 2016, two years after the first LTE network was deployed (by Smile) in Ibadan. We have been sharing our reports on the quality of the networks with the operators ever since.

“We have shared information about our efforts with the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). We have incorporated their recommendations into our platform meant to address the very unique nature of the need of a country the size of Nigeria with a growing population of people seemingly programmed to believe that it is normal to celebrate independence without learning how they came to be dependent”.

“NCC collects quality metrics for 2G and 3G networks from network operators and publish them on its website. While the majority of Nigerians are not likely to visit the NCC website for the purpose of reviewing these metrics, at least the metrics are there.

“The NCC doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the existence of LTE as a unique 3GPP mobile communication standard, let alone publish performance metrics for the networks that are based on the standard”, says the company led by Engineer Aderemi Adeyeye.

“We have gone steps further. We have created a platform for collecting quality data from the mobile networks as seen by our devices and making them available to the general public. We have professional logging tools that cost tens of thousands of dollars each for our test configuration.

“However, our mobile application data collection tool makes it possible to simultaneously collect meaningful logs everywhere there is LTE coverage.

“As the data collected using this tool is detailed enough for salient performance optimization activities, in addition to being used to create the reports, our data can be used by the network operators to improve the quality of their networks even though they are not required to do so. It can also be used for benchmarking (even by the NCC) and many other purposes.

The revealed that its purpose and data are different than those of global performance monitoring and benchmarking services such as provided by Ookla, Open Signal, Rootmetrics, Teleworld Services, Nperf, GSMA, etc.

“We focus on the unique Nigerian, not global, problem. We rely on the mobile LTE networks for our own daily business operation, as such have similar interest to ordinary human beings and small businesses in Nigeria in seeing the quality improved”.

In the following slides, they showed areas that they currently have data for.

“Cooperation of the MNOs would facilitate access to data for the rest of the country. We will make our data collection tool available at nominal fee. In return, the public will have visibility into the quality of LTE networks and the MNOs will have access to data for quality monitoring and improvement. While Core Network monitoring and observation tools are essential, they are no substitute for end-user experience that our logs provide visibility into”.

Public access to the network quality data is available via its website while special access to the network quality for MNOs is available, by request via this platform.

MTN should improve 4G LTE quality in Yaba where high quantities of packet loss create unreliable internet connectivity.

Snapshots from Christmas Day:

Captured data from various parts of the country on Christmas day

• Quality issues include
  • RRC Connection Failures
  • Radio Link Failures
  • Packet loss
  • Large packet delays
• Our UE logs provide additional insight into these issues.

• UE traveled north to south. PCI 485 served while PCI 483 was stronger. Issue could be due to missing neighbor relationship definition or failed or missing handoff attempt.
• More detailed analysis is possible with sector information overlaid.

Improving the packet latency in this major business district will result in improved productivity for businesses that rely on reliable, affordable internet connectivity. Though RF quality can be improved, it is good enough. Uplink and downlink throughputs are adequate.

(NB: MTN LTE offers us the best service in this area. Packet latencies in the other networks are higher. Furthermore, MTN RF quality (Emetrics) is higher than that of Airtel or Glo).

Improving the packet latency in this major business district will result in improved productivity for businesses that rely on reliable, affordable internet connectivity. RF quality also needs improvement.

Improving the packet latency in this major business district will result in improved productivity for businesses that rely on reliable, affordable internet connectivity. RF quality also needs improvement.

This is an example where there were no echo returns to ping packets sent to IP address 8.8.8.8.

No echo returns from the identified hex bins from Google DNS Server (8.8.8.8). We experienced packet loss in each of the bins while none of them had poor RF quality.

RF quality is good. However, UE was not able to reach the internet due to packet loss.

Concluding remarks:

LTE networks (operators) in Nigeria have access to a unique asset

• Cost-free access to real user-experience information.
• Experience-based classification of network quality supplemented with real measured values to facilitate quality improvement.
• Opportunity to improve customer experience without additional investment.

Some key benefits of this asset.

• It helps offer value for the money paid by customers without reducing the allure of doing business in an environment with scant expectation of value.
• It supports government’s professed effort to encourage participation of small indigenous enterprises in meaningful telecom engineering activities.
• The resulting opportunity for interested MNOs to claim support for government initiative should make up for anticipated dent in reputation when value is offered to perceived undeserving customers.