Ericsson plans to digitalize Nigeria via IT, solutions
Ericsson has said that it has plans to digitalize Nigeria being the most predominant country in Africa and the many opportunities that abound in the country.
This remark was made by the new President and Managing Director Ericsson, Nigeria, Mr Rutger Reman during his first media parley with some selected journalists in the company’s head office in Lagos, adding Information Communications Technology (ICT) is one of the tools that will help the Nigerian economy grow.
He explained that he has been actively engaged in 5G technological revolutions in the Middle East, adding that Ericsson is number one in city connectivity with 40 percent of the world’s mobile traffic carried over Ericsson networks, and also LTE leader in the world’s top 100 cities.
There is cloud infrastructure, he said, that can help to change things faster, while data consumption is put at 13.1 giga monthly consumption on gigabytes in 2016, 45 giga monthly consumption on gigabytes is expected by 2022.
According to him, the benefits that accrues to the Customer includes,: New ways of communicating and providing services to citizen and visitors; New Business opportunities; Improvement of citizen’s quality of life; Sustainable development; Ericsson’s Solution explicitly tailored to provide a new channel enabling financial inclusion, providing easy-to-use and secure next-generation mobile financial services, including those who do not have access to traditional banking services.
He revealed that Ericsson m-commerce solution has been discuss with the minister and CBN Governor which includes the development of mobile money platform, systems integration, learning services, managed services and support.
Reman, while fielding question on how Ericsson hope to tackle the challenges and digitalize Nigeria since broadband is still relatively low, said that they have used fibre and copper where he came from to drive network, adding that some areas in Abuja and Kaduna where he went to recently have no service at all.
He suggested that from Nigeria standpoint we need to get devices that are pushed down by price, and to get more of the foundation of the LTE infrastructure we need to come together.
“We have 2 million smart phones now. If we get 100 million then the whole ecosystem- bank, health, agriculture, education among others can use these devices,” he added.
On her part, Head of Network Products, Ericsson Nigeria, Fisayo Araoye, cited the ABI report which recorded that the indoor market is growing; the in-building wireless market will more than double by 2020, to reach around $6 billion, while indoor wireless data traffic will grow more than 600 percent by 2020.
Ericsson, she added is turning challenges into opportunities by mitigating spectrum and network limitations; must deliver more services indoors to stay competitive; ensure lower installation time and costs and ensure building owner acceptance; requirements to keep CAPEX down and lower installation time and costs; need to meet and surpass customer expectations of the mobile network; leverage macro network functionalities with integrated small cells; easy and optimized design; decrease installation time with shared infrastructure and cabling; integrated indoor small cells leverage the full capacity of network assets; decrease costs and headaches with easy LAN cabling installation; indoor as a service offers great indoor coverage; Service level based and against a service fee only; Increase network performance with robust small cells and software.
At Mobile World Congress 2017,it was said that there will be 8x mobile data traffic between 2016 and 2022 driven by video; 8 billion MBB subscriptions by 2022; 1.5 billon cellular IoT devices by 2022; Fixed Wireless Access, Smart Cities, Health Care, etc; More usage, more people, more things, more business.
Oluwaseun Solanke, Head IT and Cloud CU Nigeria stated that organisations have digital strategies, but the execution is where they fail, so we need a platform where we have to invest and where it doesn’t work we roll it out.
“We have automated mobile centre where things are moved from one place to the other without any person present and massive efficient of scale. We have deployed smart cities and education and we got mobile devices today,” he enthused.
“We have MOU with Galaxy Backbone because we are looking at solution that will empower Nigerians in education, security for better purpose.
“We need a partnership, where the operators, such as banks and the telecom will have a merger,” he said.
He noted that that the digitalization rewards will then include: “reduced churn 10 percent …. Consumer relationships…; Yearly IT cost reductions 55 percent …. Processes reinvented ….; New revenues 15 percent…. Revenues influenced.”
