The importance of 5G to Africa’s business success was underlined last week at the 2023 Africa 5G summit, run as part of the sixth Southern Africa mobile broadband VIP salon. The summit was hosted by Huawei and took place during AfricaCom, the continent’s largest technology conference. It brought together industry leaders, regional government regulators and representatives from industry organisations to share their 5G development strategies and industry experience.
The theme of this year’s summit was “5G Lights Up Africa Together Towards Business Success”. Among the topics discussed were how operators in Southern Africa can continuously build value-added networks for 5G, how they can improve the 5G network experience, accelerate fixed wireless access industry development and achieve 5G business success.
Huawei global carrier marketing and solution sales president Richard Liu opened the summit with a keynote speech titled, “Dream Africa’s 5G Prosperity, Build an Inclusive Digital Cornerstone”. He called for continuous localised innovation in Africa and for players across the sector to work together to build a digital Africa.
“The remarkable intergenerational capabilities of 5G networks are accelerating the development of the ICT industry, and also stimulating huge innovation momentum, changing our lives and society,” he said.
“Global operators with a firm 5G strategy have achieved business success. To achieve Africa’s 5G prosperity dream, building a digital Africa via three inclusive innovations: inclusive ecosystems, inclusive services and inclusive networks is recommended. These innovations can be achieved by maturing the 5G terminal ecosystem, developing FWA services and building a 4G/5G synergy network, for a solid digital foundation in Africa.”
Icasa 5G council committee director Thabisa Faye spoke about the value of spectrum in Africa.
“They say 3.6 million jobs can be derived from the mobile industry, either directly or indirectly,” she said. “When we look closely at the African scenario and more specifically the sub-Saharan region, we can see that traffic has grown quite significantly.”
MTN South Africa access and architecture general manager Zoltan Miklos shared the Ambition 2025 development strategy for the mobile network. He said 5G is key to overcoming macro and industry context and the core of ambition 2025 strategy. MTN South Africa will adopt digital solutions that lead Africa’s progress and strive to build the best 5G network, providing excellent user experience. In particular, he pointed to the need to create solutions that cater to the lived reality of African customers.
“If you look at the 5G system, a large proportion of users are on post-paid,” he said. “What’s quite important and what we’ve done is we don’t limit 5G between prepaid and post-paid. From a network perspective, every user on this network is provisioned for 5G.”
James Langat, Safaricom regional network implementation director, introduced Safaricom’s wireless home broadband strategy and spoke about the opportunities that 5G offers.
“The first opportunity, of course, is that we deliver 5G mobile broadband to our users and have a growing number of our users adopting 5G,” he said.
Zain Saudi Arabia Innovative Solutions executive general manager Alan Loh shared the company’s 5G business success results. He explained that Zain has become a global leader in 5G FWA by focusing on three core areas: leading services, leading network experience and leading technologies in the 5G era.
MTN Nigeria fixed broadband marketing senior manager Abdul Malik Ahmed shared MTN Nigeria’s “Own the home” wireless home broadband strategy, including FWA/FTTx technologies and future network construction plans. He said that FWA is the main driving force for home broadband growth. The “Own the home” wireless home broadband strategy will continue to develop 4G/5G FWA and FTTH services to win home broadband customers. MTN Nigeria will continue to enable Nigeria’s future digital transformation through 5G, he said.
Finally, MTN South Africa EBU GM Calvin Govender delivered a keynote speech entitled, “5G Accelerating Digital Transformation in South Africa” outlining how transformative 5G is across the entire value chain, including for consumers.
“5G looks at a rich experience across the segments,” he said. “At a consumer level, you’ll feel the 5G speed. You’ll be able to unlock applications and services that you could not do on the 4G network.”
Kenechi Okeleke, GSMA Intelligence regional, social and policy research director shared insights on the future development trends and opportunities of 5G FWA services in Africa. The Africa 5G Summit ended with the release of white paper titled “5G FWA in Africa, Emerging Trends and Opportunities” by GSMA Intelligence.
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