Innovative solutions needed to address unique problems of service providers in Africa: Parallel Wireless

The Nigerian telecommunications commerce goes by numerous challenges, along with lack of subscribers and rivals from Over The Excessive players. There is a sturdy should provide you with revolutionary choices for these points.

We spoke to Christoph Fitih, Product sales Director – Africa, Parallel Wi-fi to learn the way Parallel Wi-fi helps the service suppliers throughout the space to deal with the altering market requirements while they hold profitability.

Listed below are excerpts from the interview:

The Nigerian telecom market faces some very completely totally different points like a drop in subscribers and enhance throughout the utilization of OTT corporations?
That’s very true. Service suppliers proper right here have very completely totally different and distinctive points. One among many details being confronted is that of a drop in subscribers. Telcos have misplaced as many as 10 million subscribers in 2017 while there are 40 million people however to be associated throughout the nation. Furthermore the subscribers are moreover shifting away from standard cell corporations to data bundle packs, which lets them make use of Over the Excessive (OTT) corporations. The OTT players ship voice/video calls at a fraction of standard voice title costs. Nigeria’s data bundle prices are one among many lowest in sub-Saharan Africa.

Completely different challenges confronted by the commerce are low shopping for power of the shoppers. The nation’s weak macroeconomic circumstances have moreover led to extreme unemployment leading to a decreased disposable income and poor firm effectivity. All this doesn’t bode properly for the commerce.

The telcos then have little selection nevertheless to present you revolutionary strategies to convey down their operational expenditure to be prepared to provide corporations at decreased fees with out affecting their profitability. Our choices help the service suppliers achieve exactly this.

How can your choices help the service suppliers in meeting these challenges?
Parallel Wi-fi’s merchandise are primarily based totally on a singular technique of rethinking the best way by which neighborhood is designed. We undertake an entire decision primarily based technique for 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G eventually, which helps us to empower telcos to raised deal with the problems they are going by. We think about in pondering innovatively to come back again up merely deployable choices to satisfy the challenges being confronted by the telcos.

A working instance is our HetNet Gateway (HNG), an SDN and NFV-based neighborhood orchestrator, that enables telcos to easily scale their multi-vendor and multi-technology networks whereas allowing vital worth profit on the same time. It delivers extreme functionality, extreme availability and extreme effectivity demanded by right now’s networks and may also be upgradeable to the upcoming 5G radio networks.

Within the an identical vein, our Converged Wi-fi System (CWS) is a 3GPP-compliant, carrier-grade, multi-RAT node that is obtainable in quite a few sort parts and delivers speedy, reliable and cost-effective safety. On the same time, it consumes little or no power which helps with CAPEX low cost as it will possibly require a lot much less picture voltaic panels. It could moreover cut back on-going OPEX as a result of it gained’t be needing as lots power to provide the connectivity. Being very compact, CWS doesn’t require any cabinets or cooling, so in consequence, it might be positioned wherever – on towers, side of establishing, wherever that safety have to be dropped on the tip clients.

How are your merchandise completely totally different from these of various larger and established players?
We, at Parallel Wi-fi, think about in adopting a radically completely totally different technique. Our merchandise are lots easier and simpler to deploy and significantly convey down the expense of neighborhood deployment and maintenance. In keeping with this our merchandise usually have small sort subject and try to maximise utilizing obtainable sources. We extensively use automation and software program program as lots as doable to verify simplification and ease of deployment of our merchandise.

Which Nigerian telcos are you working with or are engaged with in Nigeria? How lots does Africa contribute to your earnings?
Parallel Wi-fi has energetic deployments in Ghana, DRC, Senegal, South Africa, Gambia, Nigeria and Tunisia in Africa. We hope to make a couple of of those engagements public shortly. We also have a product sales office in Ghana.

Africa is a giant market for us, and we firmly think about our merchandise and choices are ideally suited to permit service suppliers to provide corporations at moderately priced fees to their subscribers, whereas on the same time making sure profitability for themselves.

What are your future plans for the Nigerian and African market? Any deliberate investments throughout the space?
We plan to increase our engagement with the service suppliers in Nigeria and totally different African markets. We recurrently uncover quite a few decisions to extend our enterprise proper right here. We're in very energetic discussions with MNOs in Nigeria in the interim and are working exhausting to permit safety for the tip clients in Nigeria at a price that's sensible for the MNOs.

What can the telcos do to prepare the networks/infrastructure for 5G and Net of points? By when do you suppose 5G shall be launched in Nigeria and Africa?
The service suppliers would wish to make many changes of their networks to help them in meeting the challenges of the 5G experience. The conventional networks are incapable of meeting the requirements of an always-connected world. The service suppliers would need in order so as to add agility, flexibility, and scalability to their networks to deal with the requires of the ever current safety and low latency required by 5G experience.

Concurrently 5G experience begins to make its presence felt in quite a few parts of the world, we think about that older utilized sciences like 2G will proceed to be associated for an prolonged interval. On the same time, 2G in its genuine sort shall be unable to satisfy the current requirements of the neighborhood, however when it makes use of latest experience concepts like virtualization, it will possibly allow service suppliers to convey down the tariff. Virtualization moreover permits simple migration to 4G every time the market is ready for it.

The standardization physique, 3GPP has recently launched the first set of necessities, and the first industrial 5G is susceptible to be launched as early as 2019. However, initially, it's going to be launched solely in some pockets sooner than it is expanded to totally different areas. Nigeria and totally different parts of Africa are susceptible to experience 5G solely by 2022.