MTN South Africa and Huawei won the “Sustainability Champion of the Year” award at this year’s AfricaCom Awards. AfricaCom is the largest annual event in the communications industry in Africa. Its awards are designed to recognise organisations and institutions that have made outstanding contributions to the telecommunications industry in Africa.

The award was given in recognition of their work in building flexible green site solutions. Developed against the background of South Africa’s ongoing power crisis, the solution uses green and intelligent technologies to perform end-to-end site reconstruction and reinforcement with power supply, distribution, load and intelligent O&M.

Thanks to innovations that include anti-theft reconstruction and smart power consumption, the solution is highly adaptable to power outages and weak power grids and ensures more than 98% energy availability at sites. Huawei’s advanced OWS+NetEco intelligent O&M platform, meanwhile, helps achieve even greater efficiency by using AI technologies for solar, mains and diesel power supply.

The solution has been so successful in South Africa that it will also be rolled out widely in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Kenya to address the challenges of power shortages in these countries. Another significant spin-off of this partnership is that it has helped bring MTN much closer to its net-zero goals.

“As a leading operator in South Africa, MTN South Africa aims to keep the connected connected, enabling all the benefits of a modern connected life to everyone, while harnessing the power of MTN through its leading brand, footprint, connectivity, infrastructure and technology platforms,” said MTN South Africa access and architecture GM Zoltan Miklos. “As the strategic partner of MTN South Africa, Huawei provides in-depth site insights based on its powerful R&D innovation, product supply capabilities and professional local service team.”

“South Africa’s loadshedding crisis already hugely affects people’s activities and mobile network experience,” says Huawei South Africa lead Diego Dong. “Having a resilient and intelligent network has urgently become the consensus for all operators and customers. Based on the comprehensive power diagnosis and service capability, Huawei and MTN South Africa are working actively together on green ICT innovation to build intelligent, green and simplified sites, which can ensure a highly reliable network and provide the best user experience.”

As the largest communications exhibition in Africa, AfricaCom brings together decision makers in the communications field, including government departments, carriers, investors and industry analysts, to discuss the latest trends in the communications industry.