Dutch broadband firm to invest $10m in Pakistan

Investment in infrastructure is aimed at catering to needs of corporate clients

PHOTO: REUTERS

KARACHI:
Augere Pakistan, a Dutch wireless broadband company, has announced that it will invest $10 million in Pakistan in a bid to upgrade infrastructure and expand advanced internet services for the corporate sector.

The company has been in Pakistan since 2010. It would “become the first company to deploy Corporate LTE [equivalent to 4G] in 11 cities of Pakistan,” Chief Executive Officer Jamal Nasir Khan said at a press conference on Tuesday.

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Initially, they are investing $3 million in upgrading the existing internet infrastructure in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi by the end of 2017.

The company has already been providing 4G services in these cities. Later on, they would deploy the LTE (long-term evolution) infrastructure in another 11 cities, he said.

Currently, the LTE service is available to mobile phone users only. Soon, businesses will get the uninterrupted high-speed bandwidth and connectivity essential to run their operations.


“Augere will be capable of delivering speeds of up to 100Mbps per customer,” he said. Khan added the company had developed an understanding with mobile phone companies for sharing their antenna-towers in order to provide the new services.

Responding to a question, he said mobile phone companies still lacked the capacity and the capability to cater to the needs of corporate clients as they did not only need high speed, but also demanded consistency and consumed large data.

The LTE service is designed to meet high-speed connectivity and data transfer requirements of the corporate and SME clients, especially in tier-2 cities “where the corporate clients demand high capacity, low latency, unlimited volume, high spectral efficiency and flexible asymmetric service profile for large and small-scale businesses,” he said.

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The company has a vast experience of serving some of the biggest names in the world of telecom, internet service providers, banks, fast-moving consumer goods, media houses and small and medium enterprises.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24th, 2017.

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