Central America. A 5G Americas infographic on mobile technologies indicates that there have been only four LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) deployments in Central America until the first half of 2018, a region that has a total of 24 mobile networks offering services in Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama.
At the end of June, only Belize, Costa Rica and Panama had a total of four networks providing services with LTE-A technology, while the rest of the networks have LTE services. This represents 16.7 percent of the region's total mobile telecommunications networks.
Generally touted as 4G+ or 4.5G, LTE-Advanced technology is an evolution of the LTE (4G) standard, which provides higher connection speeds. According to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), LTE-Advanced offers peak speeds of 3 Gbps for download and 1.5 Gpbs for upload. Among its main advantages, it offers Carrier Aggregation, improved use of multiantenna techniques, and support for Relay Nodes, allowing it to offer higher transfer rates, better performance and efficiency in the use of resources.
In addition, the 5G Americas survey shows that only 6 cellular networks in Central America operate using the 700 MHz spectrum band, which represents only 25 percent of the total networks. The 700 MHz band, also called the "digital dividend," is used by many operators in Latin America to offer LTE-Advanced through carrier aggregation.
For the infographic, click here.
