One of the main themes at Africa Tech Festival 2022, which took place earlier this month in Cape Town, was the fact that more needs to be done in order to connect the unconnected on the continent.
While some countries are pushing ahead with the rollout of 5G, and others are looking to make their 4G infrastructure more robust, there are a myriad regions in Africa that remain unconnected.
There are a number of reasons why this may be the case, whether that we inaccessibility, the cost of building networks or developing nations simply lagging behind their more developed counterparts.
The fact of the matter is that connectivity has become more important than ever, with the World Bank noting how broadband access has a direct positive relation to a nation’s GDP.
It is why companies like Nokia, which was in attendance at the Africa Tech Festival, has outlined some ambitious objectives, such as connecting four billion people on the continent in the near future.
The value of verticals
To gain an insight into how it aims to achieve this, as well as understand what true connectivity looks like to the telecommunications firm, we spoke with its head of Mobile Networks Sales & Solutioning for MEA, Danial Mausoof.
Speaking about where Nokia is focusing its efforts, on the enterprise side of the business, Mausoof highlights the desire to enable smart industry verticals via 5G.
Mining for one, is an area that Nokia believes will benefit from enhanced connectivity, with a specific desire to automate many of the processes involved in that industry on the African continent.
“We have an enterprise channel, where we are focused on some of the industry 4.0. Moving forward private wireless will become an essential part of verticals such as mining or manufacturing. In Africa specifically on the enterprise side, mining is quite critical, but in other parts of the world manufacturing plays a very important role,” he explained.
While mining is the use case right now, given the issues surrounding food security on the continent, agriculture is another vertical where connectivity can play a pivotal part, according to Mausoof.
“If I take a strategic view, agriculture is an important vertical here (the African continent). In fact we just developed a great solution for this vertical, a quickly deployed small cell backhauled offering, where you can provide connectivity for a farmer. They are able to use that to implement a few small automation processes. In South Africa too,” he enthused.
More than the consumer
Looking at the idea of connecting the unconnected, with an emphasis of bringing connectivity to rural areas, Mausoof notes how tackling this issue requires a multi-faceted approach.
“Connectivity has many different flavours. You have consumer connectivity which you normally talk about, how your user experience is going to be as an individual. Connectivity is also community-based. So if you are able to connect a village or get some essential services to it, that’s where rural connectivity plays a huge role. How do you connect the services that are being consumed by a community is an important element?” he posited.
“I spoke about this yesterday, but from a consumer perspective you may think it’s great for everyone to have access to TikTok for example. But for me it is about citizens and how you provide access to services. One of the important elements that will happen in Africa as you evolve to 5G are the industries, public sector, and how you can connect more of the villages and communities across a wider frame,” emphasised Mausoof.
Shifting focus slightly to other technologies, especially when it comes to bringing connectivity to harder to reach areas, the Nokia executive spoke about the role that satellite is going to play.
“There’s another part that is becoming important to the idea of connectivity – satellites. So non-terrestrial, and what we can do with a base station back-linked to a satellite. You then don’t need to worry about things like fibre, because in parts of Africa there is a distinct lack of fibre infrastructure,” he continued.
As such, it is clear that there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to connecting a continent, particularly one that is as geographically diverse, politically fragmented, and at varying rates of development as Africa is. It therefore looks like Nokia is looking to leverage a wide gamut of technologies and solutions to get the job done.
[Image – Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash]
