Alcatel-Lucent to bring faster, higher-quality broadband to Africa

The company brings an unmatched heritage of ideas and execution to the challenge of realising the potential of a connected world. It includes Bell Labs, the company’s world-renowned research and development arm.

With operations in more than 130 countries, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with global reach, and the company will be a sponsor of the ninth edition of West and Central AfricaCom conference, which will focus on ICT in 24 African countries.

Alcatel-Lucent will be well represented at the conference, with Daniel Jaeger, vice president for Africa at Alcatel-Lucent, and Eric Lacombe and Alpin Verlet, country managers in West and Central Africa, in attendance. Eric Festraets, director network and business strategy, will also be delivering a key note in the plenary session on June 13, that will cover the topic “Addressing traffic explosion by advanced end-to-end network transformation”.

With your experience, so far, what are the major challenges facing the telecom sector of the West and Central African region?

Alcatel-Lucent: West and Central African economies rely on increasing mobile and internet penetration to grow. According to World Bank +10 per cent mobile penetration allow +0.8 per cent GDP and +10 per cent internet penetration allow +1.4 per cent GDP.

Service providers must invest more in new broadband technologies and modernise their network in a context of a challenge on the ARPU.

Today’s service and network providers in the region are facing three main challenges.

First of all they need to master their economics, both from cost control as revenue generation point of view.

Secondly, they need to master their end-to-end network complexity, step out of the silo/per domain strategy and look at the overall approach.

Finally they need to master the future proofness of their network evolution, implementing only the most innovative products. In other words, their main challenge is to guarantee shareholders return on investment, while mastering network complexity and providing good customer experience.

What is your vision for Alcatel Lucent expansion in Africa in 2012?

Alcatel-Lucent: Alcatel-Lucent is gaining more and more ground on the African continent. Service and network providers appreciate the focus of our company on the most cost-effective and innovative products, architectures and business models, mastering the totality of topics related to telecom business.

Alcatel-Lucent’s very strong presence in African countries is a real asset for operators. Our company is ready to engage anywhere in Africa with the accurate expertise and at any level.

We keep on investing in our human capital in Africa, so our expert teams are able to address more and more complexity in the networks that have identified us as the strategic partner for network transformation in Africa.

What is the latest technology from Alcatel-Lucent that is going to be beneficial to operators in Africa?

Alcatel-Lucent: Alcatel-Lucent has the strong belief that constant technology innovations in the various domains will lead to the optimal end-to-end network transformation strategy for the service and network providers’ community.

These include, for example, wireless with LTE and lightRadio, Wireline with converged copper/fibre solutions, edge/core with evolution into the 100G era.

Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs is providing innovation with more capacity, lower footprint and very significant energy savings. Our latest technologies allow operators to optimise their Return on Investments and to minimise their OPEX in a decreasing ARPU context.