South African operator Cell C is to upgrade to 42Mb/s HSPA+ next month and revealed it is currently testing LTE. In an interview with local website MyBroadband, CTO Ron Reddick said the upgraded HSPA network would go live in “early April” beginning in the city of Port Elizabeth. The operator will then expand the network in phases in tandem with its existing 21Mb/s HSPA network rollout. Modems capable of accessing the faster network will be made available from ZTE, though existing (21Mb/s) modems will still be able to use the network and benefit from higher network capacity (though not the faster speeds).

Reddick said that while the company is looking at 84Mb/s HSPA+, its focus for future network upgrades will be on LTE. He said Cell C was currently testing LTE at both 900MHz and 850MHz using test spectrum. Speeds in excess of 100Mb/s have been achieved in testing using Samsung LTE dongles, the operator claimed. Cell C is South Africa’s third-largest operator and had 7.2 million connections at the end of last year. It has said previously that it is aiming to become the country’s first operator to roll-out HSPA+ across its entire network footprint. It is aiming for 67 percent HSPA+ population coverage by the middle of this year.