Meeting Africa’s Internet (and business) growth needs
​​Teraco, Africa’s leading carrier-neutral colocation provider, originally broke the high-cost Internet peering spell in South Africa with NAPAfrica. Where customers collectively used to fork out millions of Rands every year to connect across major carriers, Teraco allowed them to peer for free simply by locating in their datacentres – which offered free peering by default. However, notwithstanding NAPAfrica’s low-cost peering, Teraco and its customers remained locked into high-cost proprietary hardware and software providers.

5G’s high capacity make it technically viable for the peak demands of demanding business applications
5G for cellular networks has seen a lot of interest in Africa, particularly now as the Open RAN model gains traction. Uptake of private 5G, however, has been relatively limited to fewer, more highly scaled and complex business cases. Now that’s changing because of some simple yet interesting developments. One of the major changes that has now occurred to improve 5G as a feasible solution to enterprise requirements is the sharply reduced cost, thereby creating compelling use cases.

​5G is causing a step change in Africa’s mobile networks. Operators are grappling with how to respond. Get in early? There may be expensive lessons you’ll teach your competitors at no cost to them. On the flipside, you may miss the market opportunity.  But service providers have a lot more options today to roll out 5G. Exploring these can shed light on when the best time may be.

The Open RAN (ORAN) initiative has gained serious ground in the past year. It has gained support from a slew of international vendors, including NEC. It’s also benefited from the ground-breaking Rakuten deployment.

African networks and CSPs want to expand coverage and grow the subscriber base
Mobile networks and communication service providers (CSP) in Africa need a cost-effective way to add hundreds of millions more subscribers to their networks. They do not need to add complex new services that demand the nth degree in low latency, high network throughput, and blazing speeds to support use cases that, while they may capture imaginations, offer limited commercial feasibility in Africa. This is why Open RAN adoption is accelerating. It enables cost-effective ways to integrate legacy equipment, integrate existing equipment, and share infrastructure in architectures that enable scalability, development, and innovation.

Critical Thinker equips people with the practical skills they need
“As part of the global NEC team, we talk about orchestrating a brighter future, but what does that mean? How does that impact our people and our customers? And what are we doing at ground level to bring it to life, not just for the challenges we all face today, but in how we deal with the challenges we face going forward? That’s why we developed Critical Thinker.”

Priya Naidoo is GM of HR at NEC XON Systems. She has perhaps one of the toughest jobs for an ICT systems integrator with a growing team of innovative solution providers expanding across Africa today: building and sustaining a growing talent pool from increasingly scarce resources.

Automation helps the networks improve customer experiences and boost revenues
​Mobile network operators really stand to benefit from self service kiosks. They can improve revenues and compliance. They can cut SIM-related complexities, and reduce fraud.

The automated, digital process throughout ensures consistent results for all parties. The technology is a good way for the mobile operators to expand their footprint fast and for less. They can simultaneously improve the customer experience through efficient operations.
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Self service kiosks can digitise and automate cash in, cash out (CICO) services, yet keep agents for more advanced products.