MTN Group has announced a partnership with Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to transform its communication transport infrastructure into a platform for future revenue growth and profitability.

According to the telecommunications giant, the partnership will enable it to deploy communication transport capacity to support traffic growth over the next three years.

Moreover, the partnership will support new services as part of the evolution of 5G and new enterprise services, in addition to reducing the time to market by prioritising more focused agile service provisioning.

Charles Molapisi, MTN

Charles Molapisi, MTN Group Chief Technology and Information Officer said the Group’s partnership with TIP will drive the specific requirements of MTN network to meet subscriber demands thus setting the group apart on network scalability and adaptability.

The TIP community aggregates members across the whole transport network value chain and MTN described it as a key tool for the group to build its future transport infrastructure.

David Hutton, TIP’s Chief Engineer, described the partnership as capable of edging MTN towards realising its ideal transport infrastructure.

“Through the use of open protocols and interfaces, and the ability to incorporate specific innovations focused on the performance of each network component, TIP’s open disaggregated, standard-based transport networks can help MTN move closer to its ideal transport infrastructure,” Hutton said.

To increase network efficiency, MTN has disclosed requirements that will support its work. They include delivering on the capacity requirements from all network access technologies; implementing a fully automated resilient transport network, to support high availability as demanded by advanced digital services; and allowing for an easy and efficient capacity expansion.

Another requirement is making use of standardised network configurations and open protocols, to drive lower unit costs and increase capital expenditure efficiencies - as well as the automation of the network operations by using software to optimise network resource planning and management, achieving higher operational efficiencies by enabling use cases such as smart planning, auto provisioning, network visualisation and forecasting and network slicing among others.

“MTN will work together with the TIP community in the months ahead to build transport products and network configurations addressing the company’s requirements, that could be tested and validated in TIP’s community labs and in the field, to create easy-to-use commercial solutions for the CASSI use cases,” the company stated.