The future of the next generation of cellular technology or Long Term Evolution (LTE) in South Africa may be compromised by Icasa’s choice of how to divide up the 2.6GHz range of the radio frequency spectrum. Currently, Icasa intends to divide up the 2.6GHz band into blocks of 30MHz, a decision that will make it ideal for the deployment of WiMax networks, but which is not ideal for LTE.

LTE, or 4G as it was originally called, is the next evolution of the GSM mobile communications standard and marks the first time that operators using both GSM and CDMA technologies will be deploying networks based on the same technology.