Way to celebrate MTN Ghana’s Ashantifest and MTN Uganda’s market consolidation
Nokia has been selected by MTN Group, which runs mobile operators in Africa and the Middle East, to upgrade its infrastructure and create new comms services. The first division to adopt the ‘new Nokia Voice Core evolution and Nokia Cloud platform network modernisation’ will be MTN South Africa. Nokia’s IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) promises high-quality voice and rich multimedia service for consumers and businesses.
Nokia’s cloud-native IMS will give the mobile operator a strong path to 5G, according to Giovanni Chiarelli, chief technology and information officer at MTN South Africa. “This gives customers the highest quality and fastest connectivity, with superior voice connectivity,” said Chiarelli. Central to this will be the use of voice over Long Term Evolution networking technology (VoLTE), a 4G-era bridge to the age of 5G.
Nokia’s 5G cloud infrastructure and cloud-native IMS will allow MTN South Africa to run VoLTE along with Voice over Broadband and Voice over WiFi as the foundation for Voice over 5G, said Chiarelli. This then ushers in the introduction of 5G for mobile phones.
Similarly, experience from this installation helps MTN Group ramp up the modernisation of its networks in other African countries.
Adopting a cloud-based network foundation through Nokia gives much-needed flexibility and keeps a lid on network management costs, said Raghav Sahgal, Nokia’s president of cloud and network services.
Ashantifest spirit at MTN Ghana
Meanwhile across the continent MTN Ghana’s customers will enjoy an additional 500 megabytes of data during the month-long Ashantifest celebration, announced Nii Adotey Mingle, the General Manager for the Northern Business District. The give-away is part of a celebration of the Ashanti Region of West Africa and coincides with the 25th anniversary of the company.
Along with the rich traditions of the Kingdom, Ashantifest 2021 includes a youth-oriented programme, MTN Pulse Hangout, on MTN social media platforms on September 24. MTN is rewarding customers with other packages too. The top 250 customers have already received the latest phone on the market. Meanwhile, Nokia Core Voice and Cloud Platforms could also be in the pipeline.
Meanwhile MTN Uganda could be in line for a windfall, according to The East African which reports that a troubled rival, Africell, is pulling out of the market. Africell asked the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) for guidance on how to exit the market after seven years of operation. Top of the conditions is that Africell pays its creditors, with much of its debt been unpaid interconnection fees to MTN Uganda. Meanwhile, MTN Group has committed itself to Long Term Evolution.