Chinese firm commits to driving social and economic growth in Africa

The leading global ICT solutions provider Huawei Technologies says it is ready to partner with African governments, operators and private companies to advance economic and social development in the continent through mobile broadband enhancement.

The company made the announcement during the GSMA Mobile 360 Africa series held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on July 11-13.

Huawei stressed its commitment to creating value for communities by collaborating with operators to support them in maximizing network assets.

This is in addition to deploying wireless broadband in homes to enhance Mobile Broadband (MBB) penetration and narrow the digital divide between urban and rural areas. Extending MBB coverage across African countries will help to alleviate poverty, improve healthcare and education, as well as expand financial inclusion.

The GSMA predicts that over the next five years, there will be 720 million smartphone users and up to 60 percent MBB connections in African markets. The enhanced connectivity will increase national competitiveness, innovation capacity and overall productivity.

The main challenges the industry faces in expanding coverage in both rural and urban areas include high CAPEX, difficulties in site acquisition, high infrastructure costs and long return on investment.

Dr Mohamed Madkour, the Vice President of Wireless Networks Marketing & Head of Global Demand Generation at Huawei. [Photo/provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

To seize the growth opportunities in Africa, Huawei looks at supporting operators through optimizing total cost of operations, shortening ROI and enhancing site efficiency. Huawei is raising Three-Star Site Solutions, namely PoleStar, TubeStar, and RuralStar. These scenario-specific solutions will help enable more sites in a simple, fast and cost-efficient manner.

Vice President of Wireless Networks Marketing & Head of Global Demand Generation at Huawei Dr Mohamed Madkour says, besides optimum network solutions for different deployment scenarios in Africa, they have identified three business and industry alliances.

These include content aggregation, for example, video cloud, game cloud and music cloud. The other is site ecosystem alliance and the last is fiber to the home alliance.

Madkour says rapid deployment of home broadband and indoor digital business will improve coverage and the user experience by utilizing operators’ mobility resources like 4G, 4.5G and the coming 5G.

"We are very optimistic in terms of opportunities in Africa despite all of the challenges that have been mentioned. So telecoms just need to take actions and deploy the right business solutions in order to capture those opportunities," he says.