Econet Wireless Zimbabwe has contracted Ericsson to act as the sole supplier for an upgrade of its nationwide core infrastructure. The five-year agreement also covers an upgrade of Econet’s 2G, 3G and 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio access networks (RAN) in the Harare region. For the core network project the vendor will provide a complete multi-access Evolved Packet Core, including Ericsson solutions such as Evolved Packet Gateway, Service-Aware Policy Controller, Mobile Switching Centre and Media Gateway. In the Harare area, which currently carries more than half of all traffic on the Econet network, Ericsson will upgrade the RAN to include its multi-standard RBS 6000 family of base stations for macro and small cell networks. Econet Wireless claimed over 63% of Zimbabwe’s 14 million mobile subscribers at the end of June 2014, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database.
