The importance of 5G to Africa’s business success was highlighted this week at the Africa 5G Summit 2023 (held as part of South Africa’s sixth mobile broadband [MBB] VIP lounge).
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 of industry organizations to share their 5G deployment strategies and industry experience.
The theme of this year’s summit was “5G Illuminates Africa Together for Business Success”. Among the topics discussed were how operators in South Africa can continuously build value-added networks for 5G, how they can improve the 5G network experience, accelerate the growth of the fixed wireless access (FWA) industry and achieve business success 5G.
Richard Liu, President of Huawei’s Global Carrier Marketing & Solution Sales Dept, opened the summit with a keynote address titled “Dream Africa’s 5G Prosperity, Build an Inclusive Digital Cornerstone.” In the speech, he called for continued local innovation in Africa and players across the sector to work together to build a digital Africa.
“The remarkable intergenerational capabilities of 5G networks accelerate the development of the ICT industry and also stimulate enormous innovation potential, changing our lives and society,” he said.
“Global carriers with a solid 5G strategy have achieved business success,” he added. “To achieve Africa’s dream of 5G prosperity, it is recommended to build a digital Africa through three inclusive innovations: inclusive ecosystems, inclusive services and inclusive networks. These innovations can be achieved by maturing the 5G terminal ecosystem, deploying FWA services and building a 4G/5G synergy network, building a solid African digital foundation.”
Thabisa Faye, Director and Chair of the 5G Council Committee of the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), delivered an insightful speech on the value of spectrum in Africa.
“3.6 million jobs are what they say can come from the mobile phone industry, either directly or indirectly,” he said. “When we look very closely at the African scenario and more specifically the sub-Saharan region, we can see that traffic has increased quite significantly.”
Zoltan Miklos, General Manager Access and Architecture, MTN South Africa, shared the Ambition 2025 growth strategy for the mobile network. He pointed out that 5G is the key force to overcome the macro-economic and industrial context and the core of the Strategic Ambition 2025. MTN South Africa will adopt digital solutions that drive Africa’s progress and strive to build the best 5G network and offer great user experience. In particular, he pointed to the need to create solutions that respond to the lived reality of African customers.”
“If you look at the 5G system, a large percentage of users are on post-paid,” he said. “What is very important and what we have done is that we do not limit 5G between prepaid and postpaid. From a network perspective, every user on that network is actually equipped with 5G.”
James Langat, Director of Regional Network Implementation and Operations at Safaricom, delivered a speech outlining Safaricom’s home wireless broadband strategy and also spoke about the opportunities that 5G offers.
“The first opportunity, of course, is that we provide 5G MBB (mobile broadband) to our users and we have a growing number of our users who are adopting 5G,” he said.
Alan Loh, Executive General Manager of Innovative Solutions at Zain Saudi Arabia, shared the company’s 5G business success results. He explained that Zain has become a global leader in 5G FWA by focusing on three key areas: leading services, leading network experience and leading technologies in the 5G era.
Abdul Malik Ahmed, Senior Manager Fixed Broadband Marketing Dept, MTN Nigeria, shared MTN Nigeria’s “Own THE HOME” strategy for wireless home broadband including FWA/FTTx technologies and future network build plans. He said the FWA is the main driver for the growth of home broadband. The “Own THE HOME” wireless home broadband strategy will continue to deploy 4G/5G FWA and FTTH services to win home broadband customers. MTN Nigeria, he added, will continue to enable Nigeria’s future digital transformation through 5G.
Finally, Calvin Govender, EBU General Manager of MTN South Africa, delivered a keynote address entitled, ‘5G Accelerating Digital Transformation in South Africa’. As part of the speech, he described how transformative 5G is across the entire value chain, including consumers.
“5G is looking at a rich experience across all segments,” he said. “At the consumer level, you will feel the speed of 5G. You’ll be able to unlock apps and services that you couldn’t do on the 4G network.”
Kenechi Okeleke, Director of Regional, Social and Policy Research at GSMA Intelligence, shared insights on the future development trends and opportunities of 5G FWA services in Africa. The Africa 5G Summit concluded with the release of a white paper titled “5G FWA in Africa, Emerging Trends and Opportunities” by GSMA Intelligence.