Turkey’s companies to place orders for locally developed base station technologies

ISTANBUL

Türk Telekom CEO Rami Aslan, AA Photo

Türk Telekom has said it took the first step in supporting the domestic production of 4G (dubbed “4.5G” in Turkey) technologies, and placed the first order for the 4.5G National Base Station, ULAK, as Turkcell has said it launched talks to place an order for these local technologies. 

The ULAK project was jointly developed by Aselsan, Netaş and Argela with the support of the Transportation, Maritime Affairs and Communications Ministry and the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries.

“We are proud to be first operator that placed an order for 4.5G-compatible domestic base station ULAK in line with our vision of supporting domestic production and the goal of offering the highest quality of service,” said Türk Telekom CEO Rami Aslan. 

Meeting with Aselsan officials to sign the agreement on Feb. 17, he noted: “We will be the leader in 4.5G, which will launched in April thanks to our 213,000 kilometers of fiber infrastructure and the frequencies we have which is critical for 4.5G.”

Meanwhile, Turkcell CTO İlker Kuruöz said the company had been working to transform Turkey from a technology-consuming country into a country that produces technology.

“As one of the companies that have made the most investments in domestic technology production, we consider 4.5G and 5G technologies as a very important opportunity. We believe that focusing on developing competitive technologies instead of reaching targets in certain percentages in domestic production is more valuable. For this reason, I believe that our cooperation with Aselsan, one of the most important companies of Turkey, is much more valuable in terms of developing a domestic base station in 4.5G,” Kuruöz said through a press release on Feb. 18. 

The ULAK project, which was first launched on May 23, 2013, has been considered a pioneering project in meeting the current and future mobile communications infrastructure needs of Turkey and countries in the region through national means. The utilization of domestic telecommunications products in the project was obliged by the Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK) at a rate of 30 percent in the first year, 40 percent in the second and 45 percent in the third year.