MTN South Africa and Huawei won the ‘Sustainability Champion of the Year’ award at this year’s AfricaCom Awards. AfricaCom is Africa’s largest annual communications industry event.
Its awards are designed to recognize organizations and institutions that have made innovative and outstanding contributions to the telecommunications industry in Africa.
The award was given in recognition of their work in building flexible green site solutions.
Developed in the context of South Africa’s ongoing electricity crisis, the solution uses green and smart technologies to perform end-to-end site retrofit and reinforcement with power, distribution, load and smart O&M.
Thanks to innovations that include anti-theft reconstruction and intelligent power consumption, the solution is highly adaptable to power outages and weak power grids and ensures over 98% energy availability in facilities. Huawei’s advanced intelligent O&M platform OWS+NetEco, meanwhile, helps achieve even greater efficiency by using artificial intelligence technologies for solar, grid and diesel power.
The solution has been so successful in South Africa that it will also be widely rolled out in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Kenya to address the challenges of electricity shortages in these countries. Another important spin-off of this partnership is that it has helped bring MTN much closer to its net zero goals.
“As the leading operator in South Africa, MTN SA aims to keep you connected, enabling all the benefits of a modern connected life for all, while leveraging MTN’s strength through its leading brand, footprint, connectivity, infrastructure and technology. ” says Zoltan Miklos, General Manager of Access and Architecture, MTN South Africa. “As a strategic partner of MTN SA, Huawei provides in-depth site insights based on strong R&D innovation, product sourcing capabilities and professional local service team.”
“South Africa’s loading crisis is already heavily affecting people’s activities and mobile network experience,” says Diego Dong, South Africa Delivery and Service Business, Huawei. “Having a resilient and intelligent network has urgently become the consensus for all operators and customers. Based on the integrated power and service diagnosis capability, Huawei and SA MTN are actively working together on Green ICT innovation to create smart, 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 communications decision-makers, including government agencies, carriers, investors and industry analysts, to discuss the latest trends in the communications industry.