PARTNER CONTENT: Three years after the pandemic began, the MBB VIP Salon returned at the Africa Tech Festival, formerly AfricaCom, in November 2022. The salon is a grand event in the MBB industry that typically takes place during the festival, bringing together the industry elites from Southern Africa. In its fifth edition this year, regional operators and experts from Huawei gathered to chart an end-to-end blueprint and share the experience in growing MBB. A number of warm-up activities took place, and some of the highlights include:

Local media posted a signed article by Cao Ming, President of Huawei’s Wireless Network Product Line. In his article, Cao analyzed the latest trends of global MBB technological development. “It took less than 10 years for mobile broadband to become the norm, bringing broadband access to global users and pushing forward a booming mobile Internet. Technology creates value, and innovation is the engine for future growth. 5G has already become a key infrastructure for pushing digital transformation in society as well as the healthy development of the digital economy.” As the industry moves forward, Cao believes that evolving to ultra-wideband, multi-antenna, intelligent, and energy-saving technologies is the only solution for operators looking to fulfill the explosive demand for data traffic from a growing base of users by maximizing the potential of limited site and spectrum resources while minimizing network energy consumption.

Mohamed Fouad Madkour, Huawei’s vice president for marketing and wireless solutions worldwide, gave a media interview to eight local media outlets and posted an article titled “As Africa Embraces 5G, 4G Still Has Massive Roles to Play”, that analyzes the importance of 4G for MBB development in Africa. “Even if 5G scales up extensively in other regions, 4G can still help develop the digital economy in Africa. Also, 4G can serve as the foundation for operators seeking to extend their 5G presence.” He further touched upon the necessity of 4G-5G synergy, the impact 5G has on network evolution, and the driving force behind 5G growth across Africa.

This edition of the MBB VIP Salon is themed on ‘4G-5G synergy, building on 4G, and striding towards 5G’. As 5G is rolled out across the world, 4G will also continue to evolve. With this in mind, this salon looks at how operators improve 4G in Southern Africa, construct value-oriented 5G networks, build 5G-ready target networks featuring 4G-5G synergy over medium and long periods, and accelerate FWA development. To this end, the salon set four sessions: 4G-5G synergy, FWA opportunities and challenges, microwave evolution oriented to 4G-5G synergy, and construction of highly stable core networks.

Perry Yang, Vice President of Huawei’s Wireless Network Product Line, opened the salon with a keynote speech, which discussed the latest trends of MBB and FWA development.

Emmanuel Coelho Aves, Huawei’s senior wireless director, analyzed both the current development and future trends of global 4G-5G synergy, pointing out that by 2025, despite forecasts of 3G/4G penetration rate exceeding 80% in Africa, 5G penetration rate may still be below 10%.

FDD and TDD frequency bands can be complementary in capacity and coverage for 4G and 5G, which have key network synergy effects in terms of spectrum (refarming, MIMO/Massive MIMO), planning (co-site), and networking architecture (5G NSA, EN-DC, LTE anchor, etc.).

Zoltan Miklos, General Manager of Network Planning at MTN South Africa, shared his company’s success case of 4G-5G synergy in South Africa. He stated that MTN South Africa is committed to building premium networks for digital life, providing excellent user experience, accelerating digital transformation, and leading Africa’s progress through digital solutions. These depend on the synergy of 4G and 5G networks, which covers consistent user experience, TDD+FDD network coverage improvement, and optimal multi-service network services.

Regional operators also discussed key topics such as user migration, 2G/3G network exit, NSA-to-SA evolution, 4G/5G terminal penetration rate improvement, terminal and CPE ecosystem, terminal subsidies, and 5G business success.

Barry Hou, President of Huawei’s 5G Wireless Marketing & Solution Sales, shared the global FWA trend in his speech with the theme of “FWA, Connecting Every African Family”. He pointed out that “FWA is booming around the world. Africa has a huge market potential for HBB. Huawei can help African operators achieve FWA business success. FWA will eventually evolve to 5G C-band and mmWave, and FDD-TDD synergy will be the only path toward this goal.”

James Maitai, Director for Networks at Safaricom in Kenya, shared insights on FWA opportunities and challenges in Southern Africa. He pointed out that the market space of HBB and private line services for SMEs in Kenya is huge, dozens of times that of FTTH. Fixed-FWA synergy is a crucial step toward HBB. The advanced package design of 4G FWA and 5G FWA can provide 100 Mbps new services. FWA and eMBB also need better synergy. TDD 3.5 GHz and 2.6 GHz are used for these two services, while FDD is mainly used for MBB.

Operators further exchanged views about CPE pricing, CPE performance, FWA package design, FWA business models, government subsidies for 2H services, and enterprise private lines.

Giulio Cavalli, Huawei’s senior microwave expert, talked about the evolution path of microwave oriented to 4G-5G synergy. He pointed out that simplified microwave will be the future, with full-band 10 Gbps to the site for 5G.

Solomzi Mnyaka, Senior Manager Transmission Planning at MTN South Africa, shared the opportunities and challenges of microwave development in South Africa. He pointed out that to meet CASSI requirements, transmission and access face challenges. 5G requires high-capacity microwave links. 5G backhaul will bring challenges to traditional equipment rooms. FTTS deployment takes a long time and costs a lot. In the future, microwave will continue to play a key role in site backhaul in Southern Africa, especially E-band, which features high bandwidth, fast deployment, and low TCO.

Liu Zhi, Director of Huawei Packet Core Network Product Line, introduced the high-stability core network that features fast service recovery and excellent resilience to signaling storms, making it ideal for African markets.

The salon attracted more than 70 regional operator experts and was widely reported by the local media.