The future looks incredibly bright for West Africa’s telecommunications sector. Recent major announcements from industry players, which aim to share resources and infrastructure in order to increase service coverage, are optimising financial investments and paving the way for future collaborations.
Together, these developments show an appetite for sector transformation. Nigeria remained the region’s dominant telecoms market, accounting for 42% of the region’s more than 400 million mobile subscriptions and it is projected to reach a value of $11 billion by 2029, an impressive figure that reflects the impact and criticality of continued digital enterprise transformation.
But what should that transformation look like? As more and more operators transition to cloud-native network functions and prioritise application development, the kind of innovation they tap should be built on principles and methodologies that optimise product and service delivery, streamline costs and reinforce competitiveness, and open the door to new technologies and integrations.
It all starts with an open mind leading to open source-powered innovation, ultimately advancing West Africa’s entire telecoms landscape.
The rise of telco cloud
Telecommunications is an industry that demands maximum agility. Network operators need to be able to respond to changes quickly, whether they be market trends, demand levels, or resource allocations. That need for agility in the age of cloud computing has given way to a kind of infrastructure that differs from conventional enterprise cloud.
Instead of running internal, administrative functions and customer-facing portals across public, private and hybrid cloud configurations, telco clouds focus on running restrictive network functions and business applications, backed by increased observability, control, and fault tolerance levels.
Telco clouds have also moved beyond the use of network function virtualisation (NVF) and adopted newer technologies such as containers and microservices, which form part of modern hybrid cloud architectures and give way to cloud-native functions (CVFs), the evolution of NVF.
This is becoming the future of cloud computing in telecommunications, and it brings with it significant benefits. By using non-specialised hardware and automation, telecom players can distinguish themselves from their competitors using new services and capabilities, including everything ranging from customer service to finance.
It helps them build new revenue streams, like with the current rollout of 5G services, and lets them build quality business applications and solutions using tools and platforms that run consistently across any cloud environment. But on the subject of applications…
The future of telecommunications is applications
As 5G helps to improve telecoms’ network performance in West Africa (with service availability in Nigeria significantly improving over the last two years), operators may look to accelerate their monetisation efforts with the help of application programming interfaces (APIs).
Using APIs, operators can create new, value-creating applications built on 5G features that offer high speeds and low latency.
This is just one example, but every example is dependent on telecoms having a common enterprise platform where developers test and deploy network workloads.
At the same time, by standardising and leveraging a common platform, operators can unlock the economies of scale in infrastructure cost, growing their systems as they require them, as well as increased consistency in application deployment across their networks.
An example of a telecom unlocking these benefits is Safaricom, one of Kenya’s leading communications solutions providers, which leverages Red Hat OpenShift as its common cloud platform for applications, including the telecom’s highly successful M-PESA mobile payments system.
With OpenShift now serving as the core Kubernetes-based platform for its IT environment, Safaricom increased its network availability rate from 93% to 99.98% and doubled its turnaround time for solution deployments, benefitting its customers and opening up growth and revenue pathways.
Innovation is a shared journey
Telecoms are on a mission to transform traditional infrastructure into intelligent platforms, investing in modern application development and automation to become more agile and competitive. All this requires a different mindset, one geared towards collaboration and an open approach to building and implementing services.
With the help of open source cloud-native platforms that combine innovation with enterprise-grade reliability, telecoms can improve their application and service security, portability, and scalability, hosted on infrastructure that can change and adapt as they need it.
An open approach is also critical in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). As more and more operators use predictive and generative AI-based applications and models, they need platforms that manage scaling complexity, and act upon large volumes of data.
After all, data is the fuel that propels applications and the creation of new revenue-generating features.
At a time when many telecoms may be considering their expansion options and exploring the possibilities of teaming up with other industry players, open innovation powered by trusted and vendor-supported platforms creates a foundation on which we build Africa’s connected and digitally empowered future.
Share