28 February 2025

Chris Butler, Vice President, Vodafone MEA Account, Cloud & Network Services at Nokia

As we step into 2025, the reflections from 2024 offer invaluable insights into the challenges and opportunities that shaped the African telecom industry. The past year has been particularly strenuous for this sector, highlighting several pivotal issues that need urgent attention to ensure sustainable growth and development.

While we are already seeing growing interest in autonomous networks and analytics, the reality is that the telecom industry in Africa faced sluggish progress in adopting these technologies in 2024. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) found themselves in a difficult position, having to juggle between maintaining traditional network operations and making substantial investments in automation and intelligent analytics. The slow pace of automation deployment is impeding the provision of advanced service offerings, putting CSPs under significant pressure to pivot towards enterprise use cases and Fintech services to sustain growth.

11 February 2025

Linda Clark, MD, Mobile Mark Europe

During the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, I saw the essential role antenna infrastructure and technology played in providing reliable connectivity and access for visitors as well as underpinning critical communications. Just as in Africa, the requirement for connectivity in the UK was a challenge that had to be achieved between venues and while users were on the move.

The 2022 Commonwealth Games was attended by 1.3 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom wanted to connect their portable devices to the internet. This is a major challenge to all mega events, where people now expect to have access to fast, reliable communications and transmission capability. How this is achieved often must depend on what systems are already available at a venue and its environs. Options can include Wi-Fi 6 as an enhanced version of the 2.4/5GHz spectrum - 2.4GHz provides the most coverage at slower transmission speed, while 5GHz gives less coverage but higher data transmission speed - to allow multi-user connectivity. Meanwhile, LTE and 5G provide good communications with the capability for expansion via temporary cell sites. There are also Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS), widely used in stadia, which facilitate multipleuser, high speed connectivity. The network used is often determined by what is already available and the resources available to pay for access to a network.