Africa, with a population of over 1.1 billion, is home to over 800 million mobile connections and nearly 450 million unique subscribers. Quickly becoming one of the fastest growing regions in smartphone sales in the world, mobile operators in Africa see a significant opportunity for growth, but also recognise the challenges they are faced with as they work to support this growth while reducing the significant, and regionally-specific operating costs that providers all over the rest of world over do not have to address.

The prevalence of inexpensive smartphones, aided through partnerships between mobile network operators and handset manufacturers, has helped fuel this recent growth, and smartphones are now being designed and introduced specifically for the African market. The problem, however, is that mobile networks in Africa have grown beyond the reach of grid electricity. Thus, mobile operators have had to deploy a significant part of their tower infrastructure in areas without any access to grid infrastructure, creating both infrastructural and operational difficulties.

Below we will discuss some of the challenges facing operators in this region, how to overcome these complexities, and how to develop operationally efficient wireless backhaul in Africa.

The challenges

There are huge distances to reach subscribers: even though the population has slowly started to shift to more urban regions, many Africans still live in rural areas. To provide connectivity, operators overwhelmingly use long haul for nationwide backhaul. While it may be their best choice, it still requires stretching backhaul links across rural, often difficult terrain –impossible for fiber implementations. Moreover, these remote sites are often off the electricity grid, requiring generators. Such a constraint requires network operators to supply fuel to remote sites, a particularly costly endeavor because such an operation requires convoys, for security reasons.

There has been a mass move from 2G to 3G, to 4G: Although smartphone use drives the rise of IP-based services, operators must still be able to simultaneously PDH and SDH systems. But legacy systems require separating SDH from Ethernet traffic, yielding lower capacity per carrier, costing more per byte and wasting equipment/spectrum for a dedicated carrier that remains idle most of the time.

There is a major lack of skilled personnel: To operate heterogeneous wireless backhaul networks, your staff needs to possess an extremely broad skill-set. They need to be able to know about different types of equipment, from different vendors. Examples include using a 3rd-party vendor to supply the long-haul or E-band portion of the network, or an all-outdoor product based on another technology entirely.

The ability to support these diverse network needs can burden your staff – many of whom are already scrambling to learn the disparate technologies. With all that learning and training, productivity suffers. When a new solution or product is introduced, the cycle starts again, requiring training for each one, and, as you well know, such training requires time and money.

Achieving business goals

Faced with these challenges, operators need to find a way to achieve their business goals. In view of the inability to raise prices – which would only lead to subscriber churn – the one area where operators can improve is increasing operational efficiency.

The following suggestions can help mobile operators increasing efficiency, allowing them to realise the potential of the African telecom market.

1. Can the wireless backhaul solution save the huge, fuel-transit related costs involved in maintaining connectivity to rural populations?

While energy-related costs are high all around the world, the costs grow even more for mobile operators. According to Cap Gemini, energy-operating expenses comprise up to 50% in developing markets, with a high proportion of off-grid sites, where only a poor quality electricity grid is available.

This may seem exaggerated, but it isn't, especially for those off the power grid in rural areas. Operators must use local generators, which consume millions of diesel gallons per year. More fuel means more fuel tankers moving larger generators to remote sites.

Choosing a solution with smart, green-mode technology can both minimise power consumption as well as minimise site visits per year. Green mode dynamically adjusts actual energy consumption to the required transmit power. And, as a result, for high-availability links, you can transmit power on maximum for a fraction of the time, rather than relying primarily on medium/low power. The savings? 35% in wireless backhaul power expenses.

The savings become even more dramatic for generators in remote sites. Since the optimal load for a generator is ~65%-70% of the maximum load, you can conserve fuel, reduce A/C requirements, decrease the number of costly fuel tanker dispatches to sites and reduce generator size – while cutting the high cost of sending generators.

2. Can this solution efficiently and reliably support legacy and IP services and traffic?

To enable use of both SDH and IP traffic without interference or interruption, you need to evaluate the wireless backhaul solution's capability to upgrade using techniques such as hybrid multi-carrier, adaptive bandwidth (MC-ABC). This technology eliminates the need to use a dedicated carrier for legacy traffic, adaptively distributing STM-1 signals, over all radio carriers within a long-haul link, accounting for the radio capacity of each carrier in real time.

Not only does hybrid MC-ABC allow both types of traffic simultaneously, it also delivers at least 20% more capacity over each carrier, using 25% fewer carriers.

For example, assume you have a 6GHz long-haul link carrying 4 x STM-1 and 600Mbps of high-priority Ethernet traffic, which uses 28MHz channels. The current architecture requires an 8+0 trunk. With hybrid MC-ABC, you can carry both types of traffic, legacy SDH and Ethernet, without requiring a carrier that only carries backup SDH traffic. You also increase modulation over all carriers, providing the same capacity, but using 25% less equipment. Thus, you need only six carriers, which also require less frequency and power use.

3. Is the solution easy to install, plan, manage and maintain so that staff can focus on additional tasks?

With staff basically "running in place" to keep on top of network technologies, a unified wireless backhaul solution will streamline the knowledge race. Such a platform takes a "know one, know them all" approach, using the same skill set for all deployment, all maintenance and all management. Staff would require very little in the way of training.

Thus, you can increase productivity in your backhaul network by some 30-40%, quickly deploying wireless backhaul links and networks throughout your entire network infrastructure: for any type of network access, aggregation, backbone, small cells, at any frequency (4-86GHz), for any network site (all-outdoor, split-mount, all-indoor) and for any transport network architecture (L2, L3 and in the future – SDN).

Additionally, you can streamline network management and maintenance as well as network engineering tasks, such as network-wide radio configuration, IP networking planning and performance monitoring, for greater cost effectiveness. And, you gain much more flexibility in introducing new technologies into the network, while enabling the rollout of new services faster, decreasing churn and attracting new subscribers.

* By Amit Ancikovsky President, Latin America; President, Africa of Ceragon