Telecommunications and ICT giants MTN Zambia and Huawei completed the world's first commercial deployment of the new five-band LampSite solution at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre, in Lusaka. The solution combines 1.8 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 2.3 GHz, TDD 2.6 GHz, and 3.5 GHz in a single box and supports multi-band coordination for peak speeds of 1 Gbps. This deployment marks the start of a new phase of upgraded 5G indoor connectivity in Zambia.

New five-band LampSite commercial launch at the Mulungushi International Conference Centre

The year 2026 is a crucial year for scaling indoor 5G in Zambia, a country that has registered a strong mobile network growth, evidenced by an expanding base of mobile Internet users and increasing popularity in HD video, livestreaming and cloud services. This dynamic has been exerting enormous pressure on indoor networks in heavy-traffic areas like exhibition centres, airports and business districts.

This has been especially obvious at the Mulungushi centre, a bustling venue for high-profile summits, exhibitions, and business events. The 3.5 GHz macro base stations are unable to ensure strong signals, while the distributed antenna system lacks the capability to support multi-band, causing the indoor networks to fall short of 5G speed and capacity requirements. Separate multi-band networking increases equipment complexity, deployment time, and operation and maintenance costs.

These issues prompted MTN Zambia to deploy Huawei's next-generation LampSite, a powerful digital indoor network solution that builds on a simplified architecture and significantly improves user experience, capacity and energy efficiency. This deployment is marked by the following highlights.

• User experience upgrade: The industry-leading headend pRRU supports five bands in a single box for 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G. This enables the operator to capitalise on 3.5 GHz 4T channels and TDD 2.6 GHz through carrier aggregation. The network provides a single-user downlink peak speed of 1 Gbps, enabling indoor Gbps connectivity consistent with outdoor areas—key to ensuring zero lag for HD video, cloud and livestreaming users.
• Simplified, green deployment: Featuring an optical, multi-band architecture, LampSite simplifies deployment and reduces headends by up to 50% to cover the same area. This significantly reduces capital expenditure and construction time. LampSite uses intelligent dormancy and symbol-level power saving to enable "0 Bit 0 Watt" green networks with greatly reduced operational expenditure.
• Smooth evolution: LampSite supports 5G-A, allowing further indoor network upgrades to support smart operations and emerging immersive services like XR, AR navigation, and glasses-free 3D.

MTN Zambia CTO Thomas Ngoma spoke highly of the deployment.

"Our 5-in-1 LampSite deployment at Mulungushi enables us to deliver consistent indoor and outdoor experiences. It is another testament to our tech-driven commitment to industry-leading reliable user experiences. With this deployment, we will be better positioned to provide fast, seamless and reliable connectivity for indoor HD video calling, online interactions, and AR/XR applications," he said.

Huawei small cell product line president Dr Philip Song stated: "This benchmark LampSite network for MTN Zambia features industry-leading multi-band coordination, simplified deployment, and energy savings. We will deepen our collaboration with MTN Zambia to replicate the multi-band solution and 4T in more areas like airports, central business districts, and transportation hubs. We are confident that indoor 5G will enable digital infrastructure upgrades and stimulate the Zambian digital economy."