By Christopher Saul, Territory Sales Lead for East Africa at Red Hat
Telecoms across East Africa face a serious challenge in the form of growing demand for digital content. In Kenya alone, despite the recent introduction of taxes, more than three-quarters (76.5%) of internet users under the age of 16 pay for digital content each month. This is the fourth-highest rate in the world after Sweden, Norway and Mexico. From streaming and mobile apps to media subscriptions and essential services, regional users are embracing the full scope of the global digital economy, making it a core part of everyday life.
The situation carries huge implications for telecommunications firms, which must align their strategies with the digital era. They need to prioritise bandwidth, latency and intelligent solutions while reshaping their networks and infrastructure to accommodate the region’s growing needs. As telecoms continue to embrace cloud computing and cloud-based infrastructure, they also need to consider new network architectures. In other words, what does the telecom network of the future look like?
Infrastructure is going virtual
The growing number of digital services and subsequent users is placing huge demands on network resources. Networks are also becoming inherently bigger and more complex, which presents a management challenge. The solution lies in network architecture that breaks functionality down into different layers, effectively abstracting network traffic controls from the applications and services that run on top of them.
Software-defined networking (SDN) enables a software-controlled approach to network architecture with the help of application programming interfaces (APIs), centralising communication with the overall infrastructure and the means to direct network traffic. This offers several benefits, including simpler network control, dynamic load balancing and greater flexibility. Although centralisation does create risk by creating a potential single point of failure, network controllers can mitigate that by implementing network redundancy with automatic failover.
In particular, telecoms can benefit from network function virtualisation (NFV), which supports SDN by providing the infrastructure on which SDN software can run. This gives network operators the option to run network functions on different servers and move them across as needed. The result is that telecoms in East Africa can deliver apps and services faster, enhancing the customer experience and creating a network that is more flexible and uses resources more efficiently.
From hardware-centric to software-defined
Many sectors in East Africa stand to benefit from a more software-centric approach to infrastructure, especially enterprises that rely on networking and branch networks. The telecommunications industry is a standout given the trend of digital transformation. The COVID-19 crisis also did a great deal to highlight the importance of distributed networks and how enterprises need to prioritise architectures that ensure control, security and scalability.
With a software-defined approach, telecoms reduce their operating and hardware costs, literally saving server room space. They can simplify network planning and set-up, make quick adjustments and troubleshoot when needed, reduce the potential number of network errors that result in downtime, and better meet the security needs of their software and applications. SDN marks a turning point for telecoms which have to provision large amounts of connectivity, which is highly applicable to East Africa where telecoms are working to expand network coverage.
Leveraging an open hybrid cloud
While telecoms are facing increasing network demands, they need a means to manage data and applications across diverse platforms, including both on-premises and public cloud environments, without compromising agility and network flexibility. Hybrid cloud has emerged as the optimal strategy for telecoms, as it combines public and private platforms and enables them to scale their IT infrastructure as needed.
Cloud technology also factors heavily into telecoms’ AI plans. It provides access to on-demand resources for handling large datasets, training models and delivering low-latency inference, leading to AI innovations for functions such as network performance monitoring. AI is also a way for telecoms to stay competitive, allowing them to offer personalised customer services and launch products that respond directly to market trends and expectations, overall transforming the business’s value proposition and its relationship with its users.
Rethinking network architectures from the ground up is no simple task. Indeed, telecoms across East Africa will encounter many unforeseen problems. However, by having a sound cloud strategy in place and with the help of consistent, supported software platforms, they can offer the digital experience that consumers and businesses expect and deserve.
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