Leadership and innovation are at the core of Afghan Wireless’ operations. As the first telecommunications provider in Afghanistan, the company aims to be the first to offer high speed broadband to every major Afghan city. As Afghan Wireless continues to introduce its new 3.75G service across the country, it is upgrading its existing 2G network to offer subscribers enhanced speed, security, and reliability, continuing its role as a pioneer in the Afghan telecom sector.
2G – Entering the Digital Space
On April 6, 2002, Afghan Wireless Communication Company launched its GSM network after little more than two months of development time. The newly formed company worked with impressive speed and efficiency to plan, build, test, and operate the new network, striving to meet Afghanistan’s dire need for telecommunications services as quickly as possible.
When interim Chairman Hamid Karzai placed the first AWCC call to an Afghan expat living in Germany, it marked the official launch of 2G services in Afghanistan—a huge technological transformation for a nation recovering from decades of conflict. Similarly, the advent of 2G represented a significant evolution in the world of wireless mobile technologies.
After 1G, the first generation of “brick” and “bag” mobile phones owned by a small number of tech-savvy individuals in the 1980s, mobile technology made the jump from analog to digital with the adoption of 2G. Introduced to consumers for the first time by Finnish telecom provider Radiolinja in 1991, 2G offered better call quality and, most notably, unprecedented mobile data services. Although 2G speeds initially topped out at only 100 Kbps (kilobits per second), cell phone users could now send SMS and MMS messages over GSM networks—the new global standard supporting second generation mobile communications.
One distinguishing feature of 2G technology is its use of circuit switching. On a circuit-switched network, each user occupies a specific frequency. As electronic signals pass through multiple switches to establish a connection for a call or data transfer, these switches are reserved for this network traffic alone. For this reason, 2G networks are slower and more vulnerable to interference when compared to later mobile generations.
3G – Enhancing Wireless Capabilities
As denoted by its name, 3G represents the third generation of wireless mobile technology. Defined by the standards of the International Telecommunication Union, 3G networks offer data rates ranging from 200 Kbps to 2 or 3 Mbps. Third generation mobile technology is extremely data-oriented, offering increased data transfer speeds and network capacities that support a wide range of new telecom services.
In addition to enhanced voice telephony, 3G allowed for both mobile and fixed wireless Internet and helped to introduce mobile TV and video call technologies. This is due in part to 3G’s more advanced method of data transmission. Rather than utilizing circuit switching, 3G networks are packet-switched, much like wired Internet traffic. As data is transmitted across a network via packet switching, it is broken into smaller units—or “packets”—that travel to the same destination via the most efficient channels. Each packet includes a payload of data and a header address, which determines its final destination and eventual reassembly with other data packets.
Packet-switching allows 3G networks to provide more efficient scaling than previous mobile generations, and also enables asymmetric upload and download traffic, variable bit rates, and multiplexing. The first commercially available 3G network was deployed by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo in October 2001, and less than a decade later, 3G networks around the world were enhanced by the updated High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) mobile protocol. However, the rapid evolution of mobile technologies continued to spur advances in mobile Internet connectivity. More powerful smartphones and tablets soon encouraged the advent of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Evolved High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+) protocols, the latter of which forms the backbone of AWCC’s most advanced wireless network.
3.75G+ – Looking Toward the Next Generation
The improved technological standards of HSPA+ have led to the creation of 3.5G and 3.75G networks. Suitable for use by smartphones, laptops, and even mobile modems, these evolved 3G networks support download speeds of up to 42 Mbps—a vast improvement compared to 2G and 3G standards.
Striving to deliver the best possible mobile Internet services, Afghan Wireless has upgraded many of its networks directly from 2G to 3.75G, becoming the first and only Afghan telecom provider to offer mobile broadband connectivity via HSPA+ technology. It first launched its 3.75G+ services in Kabul, leveraging state-of-the-art technologies to restructure its local radio and core network to provide the fastest 3G service in the city. These infrastructure upgrades included the construction of a fully redundant backhaul transmission network to support an increased volume of data transmission.
3.75G+ offers AWCC subscribers improved Internet speeds for faster, more reliable web surfing, video streaming, and online gaming. It has also enabled the company to roll out High Definition Voice Service across Afghanistan, providing clearer, more consistent call quality throughout its nationwide service area.
As of April 2016, Afghan Wireless has launched its 3.75G+ high-speed services in 13 Afghan provinces, and continues to expand mobile broadband coverage to its nationwide network of more than 4 million subscribers.