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What role is Alcatel Lucent playing to connect people in the rural areas in Africa?
Alcatel-Lucent: Connecting people in rural areas is about offering cost-effective solutions for scarcely populated areas and it is about responding to the need of the people in an affordable way.
Under these circumstances we believe our global end-to-end network architecture encompasses the most advanced wireless technologies with acceptable cost points.
Customers want faster and better wireless services at lower prices, so operators need a quick, low-risk network evolution strategy.
We provide to our customers full turnkey end-to-end projects, from civil work to network integration, allowing best quality of the network at the lowest cost of ownership for service providers.
In today’s competitive market, how confident are you that the Alcatel-Lucent innovation will fly in African market?
Alcatel-Lucent: Knowing Alcatel-Lucent always concentrates on responding to the customer’s needs when designing and developing new and innovative products, we are pretty confident the above mentioned innovations will definitely fly in Africa, they help service and network providers in the sense they are cost-effective, fitting into an end-to-end strategy and future proof – exactly what the major players in Africa expect.
Alcatel-Lucent has played a major role in the roll out of most of the five submarine cables in operation at end of 2012 including ACE coming here at the conference in Dakar.
What is the future of wireless broadband, especially in Africa?
Alcatel-Lucent: We believe wireless broadband will play a major role in the connectivity game of the [near] future in Africa. The combination of availability, cost and bandwidth evolution dictates us to do so.
Nevertheless, checking the forecasts of wireless traffic for the coming years, Alcatel-Lucent believes that complementing wireless broadband with fixed technologies, mainly for backhauling and offloading the traffic but also in an opportunistic way for those areas where fixed infrastructure is available, will definitely optimise the business case of the service and network providers.
Also a certain number of 3G roll-outs are ongoing in areas one considered hopeless for 2G services thanks to adoption of smartphones and usage of USB dongles.
Many countries like Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Angola and Tanzania are now exploring LTE and 4G.
More LTE rollouts are to come in the medium term across Africa, which will further create attractive environments for investments in term of regulation and taxes. It is very promising to receive good signs, like the recent ones from Senegal, in this direction.
Alcatel-Lucent to bring faster, higher-quality broadband to Africa
