We will supply GiGA Solution to Thailand and Botswana," KT said on August 28. KT struck the deal with Thailand's No. 1 operator, Advanced Info Service (AIS) and Botswana's Botswana Fiber Networks (BoFiNet).
KT supplied GiGA LTE Solution to AIS in Thailand and signed an agreement on supplying the solutions with BoFiNet in Botswana on August 21.
AIS is the No. 1 telecom operator with about 51% of the population in Thailand as of the first quarter in 2017. AIS judged that GiGA LTE Solution is an alternative to speed competition in the Thai mobile market which entered the “one smartphone for one smartphone” era. Therefore, AIS has been preparing an LTE service for general subscribers since March of this year.
AIS launched its 'NEXT G' Service using GiGA LTE Solution at its AIS Experience store in Bangkok's Central World Shopping Mall on Aug. 17. In this event with the participation of more than 1,000 customers, HuiWeng Cheong, president and COO of AIS demonstrated the GiGA LTE directly and received great positive responses from attendees by recording the top speed of 1162.3Mbps.
KT and AIS agreed to cooperate on securing new growth engines in the future telecom market with the launch of GiGA LTE Solution. GiGA LTE Solution’s advancement into Thailand is KT’s second success after GiGA LTE commercialization with Turk Telekom Group (TTG), Turkey's leading wireless telecommunication group, in April of last year.
Moreover, on August 21, KT signed an agreement with BoFiNet in southern Africa to supply GiGA Wire Solution to Botswana. BoFiNet is a state-run communications company under the Ministry of Communications of Botswana. KT's GiGA Wire Solution which achieves an Internet speed of 1Gbps with copper cables only without optical cables, is expected to bring innovation to the Botswanan people’s information and communication lives of the people of Botswana where copper is a major export item and the Internet penetration rate is less than 30%. On top of that, the agreement is expected to play a big role as a bridgehead for KT GiGA Wire Solution’s advancement into the African market.