Ericsson drives Airtel in historic 16-country deal

In riding on Ericsson network to upgrade and expand its network infrastructure, Bharti Airtel has completed a comprehensive upgrade of network to deliver superior service in 16 Africa countries. DigitalSENSEBusiness News gathered that this deal involves an end-to-end network transformation programme across Airtel Africa’s mobile operations.

The programme is also tagged the largest of its kind on the African continent, includes a comprehensive upgrade and expansion of network elements on all of Airtel’s African operations, namely switching, radio, network management, data, charging, and consumer-services platforms and systems.

A press statement from Communications Manager, Ericsson West Africa, Ms Omasan Ogisi, indicated this network transformation programme, will see Ericsson deploying latest wireless technologies to enhance Airtel’s network capacity and robustness and help deliver best-in-class services to customers at affordable rates.

This also makes Airtel’s networks fully ready for next generation services that include high speed data and value added services.

In addition, she noted a full upgrade of the charging platforms across all operations was implemented, introducing the latest version of Ericsson’s Charging System, enabling Airtel to offer subscribers new and innovative value-added services such as mobile wallets. This project will result in Airtel’s 60+ million customers having a better experience on their networks.

She quoted Eben Albertyn, the Chief Technical Officer, Airtel Africa as saying “The customer is at the core of everything we do at Airtel. The implementation of this transformation program will enable us to further enrich our customer experience across the region. It allows us to provide Airtel subscribers with the best network possible while meeting the growing usage of mobile data. Our long-standing relationship with Ericsson gave us confidence in their ability to manage and deliver such a large and complex project.”

Emphasising that backed by 12,000 consulting and systems integration professionals across the world, over one hundred Ericsson resources worked onsite to ensure successful delivery of this complex project – the largest network modernization program in Africa’s telecom history. Ericsson’s systems integration organization delivers more than 1500 systems integration projects per year in multi-vendor and multiple-technology environments. Projects range from single-solution integrations to end-to-end solution transformation projects such as this one.

Equally, Lars Lindén, head of Ericsson Sub-Saharan Africa, pointed out that in the transition to a Networked Society in Africa, operators are facing growing challenges in meeting the rapidly evolving demands of consumers.

“The focus of this project was transforming Airtel Africa’s networks to meet current and future consumer demands,” Linden said.

DigitalSENSE Business News recalls that this transformation programme follows the 2011 announcement of an ongoing five year multi-country managed services agreement, wherein Ericsson manages and optimises Airtel’s mobile networks across Africa.

Remmy Nweke

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