Ammon News - by Mohammad Ghazal/ Jordan Times

AMMAN — It is time to introduce long-term evolution (LTE) services in Jordan to meet the growing demand on data consumption, according to Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson.

“Several countries in the Middle East have already started offering LTE services, and I believe it is the right time for introducing these services in Jordan, taking into account the rise in Internet traffic,” Tarek Saadi, head of the northern Middle East region at Ericsson, said in a recent interview with The Jordan Times.

LTE is a Fourth Generation (4G) telecommunications standard for transferring data over mobile networks.

In Jordan, the number of smartphone holders is on the rise and expected to witness further growth in the near future.

Such phones enable the downloading of applications and watching videos and other features that need the high Internet capacities of LTE, which offers data transfer rates of up to 150 megabits per second, he said.

“LTE gives higher speeds that make video watching easier… in addition there are applications in e-health and e-education fields that require LTE services,” Saadi noted.

The country’s three mobile operators, Zain Jordan, Orange Jordan and Umniah, provide Third Generation services to over two million users.

The government has recently said it will float a tender for the provision of LTE services in the country, which opens the door for a fourth mobile operator, a matter that was rejected by the three existing operators on the grounds that it is still “premature to provide LTE services in Jordan and that the market is saturated”.

LTE allows for high-speed Internet browsing of multimedia applications such as video-conferencing, high-definition broadcasting, video blogging and high-speed video uploading to social websites.

LTE services are provided in six Arab countries, mainly the Gulf states, according to the Arab Advisers Group, which provides research on telecommunications.

According to a report recently issued by Ericsson, around 700 new million mobile subscriptions are expected to be added in the Middle East and Africa by the end of 2018.

The Mobility Report’s findings also that mobile-data traffic will continue to grow significantly in the coming years, a trend driven mainly by video consumption.