Etisalat Highlights The Importance Of Effective Deployment Of Infrastructure For 4G Networks in Africa

Etisalat Nigeria’s Head, Turnkey Rollout of the Engineering and deployment department, Mr. Valentine Amadi has highlighted the need for telecommunication operators to effectively deploy 4G infrastructure for a new market in Africa. This call was made recently at the Africa Com conference and exhibition organized by Informa Telecoms and Media in Cape Town, South Africa.

Speaking during the Mobile Broadband and LTE sessions chaired by Jean-Pierre Bienaime, SVP Strategy & Communications Wholesale, Orange and Chairman, UMTS forum, he emphasized the importance of a review of existing infrastructure, regulatory, environmental and Government issues and the need for government to take over construction of service ducts on roads in Africa for telecoms installations.

He said, “Strategies for deployment of 4G network are chiefly determined by factors such as technology, regulatory terms, market size, environment/location as well as cost/project finances. With a global market of 5 billion, a projected penetration level of 47% by 2017, majority of the 1.8billion anticipated new connections are expected to come from the developing economies which are notoriously deficient in infrastructural developments with roughly 62% of Africans living in urban slums.”

He further listed the fundamental institutional issues that confront operators in delivering a 4G network as spectrum assignment and availability, choice of technology across countries and continents, quality of service regulations for networks in hybrid architecture, convergence of platforms for all services, lack of Infrastructure (power, transmission, transport, security), adverse local operating environments, uncertain regulatory environments and complex fragmentation of LTE frequencies at national and regional levels.

“It has become necessary to institute a tax-free or tax-rebate regime to traffic generated in rural parts of Africa rather than using the current Universal Service Provision mechanism which does not encourage telcos appropriately. Government should on another level finance the civil infrastructure needed by telecoms operators as part of Utilities provisioning similar to water, power et al and for operators to pay rent for them”. He continued.

Amadi concluded by raising questions on sales and marketing implications of deploying the 4G network which will determine the marketing reaction of African data consumers and the need for telcos to invest in partnership with Public Sector agencies to provide Government services as Telco applications and products.

AfricaCom is Africa’s largest communications conference & exhibition. Now in its 15^th year, this trailblazing event gathers together 7,000 senior decision-makers from the telecoms, media and ICT industries. This year recorded over 200 speakers who shared their vision of Africa’s future communications landscape and an expanded agenda to incorporate many more co-located events which will attract new audiences from the apps development, broadcast, digital music, entrepreneur, investment and business sectors.