In an exclusive interview, Naveed Kashif, Mobile Networks Market Unit Head for Southern Africa at Nokia, discusses how the company is adapting to emerging technologies in 2024 and 2025. He shares insights on Nokia's strategies, recent partnerships, industry challenges, and forecasts for 5G rollout, highlighting plans to drive innovation and enhance service delivery into 2025.
Given your experience in product lifecycle management and professional services, how is Nokia Southern Africa adapting its strategies to emerging telecom technologies and trends in 2024 and 2025?
In Southern Africa, Nokia is adapting its strategies for 2024 and 2025 by leveraging emerging telecom technologies and aligning with global trends in digitalization, sustainability, and industrial automation.
In the short term, connectivity and bridging the digital divide are imperative, meaning that mobile and fixed networks need to be smartly deployed to provide high quality network connectivity to the millions of users in Africa. For example, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) over 5G in combination with the FTTx solution should be the key focus on the African continent. Of course, Nokia also recognizes the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies. These will play a crucial role in enhancing network performance, efficiency, security and digitalization of operations, hence making network roll-out more efficient and economical for Africa.
Nokia has also developed its 2030 vision where we have tried to introduce the concept of the intersection between the human, physical and digital world. We envision that in 2030, technology will significantly extend the scope of human possibilities by connecting the human, physical and digital worlds, and with this digitized convergence, a major transformation across societies and businesses will be inevitable.
Additionally, Nokia is advancing in various other domains, such as helping our partners in developing API economy, AI based operations, and energy efficient networks for Africa to significantly reduce carbon footprint.
What new partnerships has Nokia Southern Africa formed recently, and how will these impact the region's telecom infrastructure into 2025?
Nokia’s aim in the Southern Africa market is to effectively engage and work with all industry partners such as service providers, telecom infrastructure companies, enterprises, and government institutions, including regulatory bodies, to take maximum steps in unlocking the telecommunication economy on the Africa continent. In this context, we will continue to enhance our partnerships and build eco systems, which can deliver sustainable telecommunication solutions and services.
In addition to building 5G networks for service providers, we see huge potential in the digitalization of various other sectors such as public safety, ports, railways and digital cities. Nokia continues to work in building a strong partnership portfolio to grow our enterprise business in 2025 and beyond.
What key challenges does the telecom sector face in Southern Africa, and how does Nokia plan to address them?
The telecom sector in Southern Africa faces several key challenges, and Nokia is actively working to address them through strategic initiatives. Some of the main challenges include:
- Network coverage and connectivity gaps – Many rural and remote areas in Southern Africa remain underserved or disconnected from reliable networks.
- High infrastructure costs and investment needs – Building and maintaining telecom infrastructure is expensive.
- Digital divide and inclusion – The digital divide between urban and rural areas, as well as disparities in access to technology for different socioeconomic groups, is a persistent issue in Southern Africa.
- Capacity for future growth (5G) – The telecom sector must prepare for the surge in data traffic. This requires upgrading existing infrastructure to support and monetize data traffic.
- Sustainability and energy efficiency – Power supply remains unstable and expensive in many African countries. Operators seek to reduce their cost and environmental footprint.
By tackling these challenges with innovative technology, strategic partnerships, and a focus on sustainability, Nokia is positioning itself as a key player in the transformation of Southern Africa’s telecom sector. For example, Nokia’s Radio Access portfolio is powered by the latest generation of Nokia’s ReefShark System on Chip (SoC) technology. This ensures significant performance and energy efficiency gains. Moreover, it supports the massive processing needs of future networks while keeping energy consumption at a minimum, which is fundamental for the Southern Africa market.
Given the rapid advancements in 5G technology, what is your forecast for the rollout and adoption of 5G in Southern Africa through 2024 and into 2025?
There has been a rather slow roll-out of 5G networks in Southern Africa region, which means 5G coverage is still mostly limited to the major cities and primarily driven by the operators in South Africa. However, even in South Africa, 5G penetration is rather low and believed to be in the range of 40% of the population coverage. I can understand that in Africa, operators have primarily remained focused on 4G Networks to ensure maximum return on investment, however starting in 2025 and beyond, I envision a much more aggressive uptake in the 5G roll-out. This will be driven by revenue growth targets for operators as well as the need to improve overall customer satisfaction to maintain best-in-class network positions. I think that in Southern Africa, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) use cases are fundamental for 5G growth.
In 2025 and beyond, I also foresee good traction in the private wireless market where Nokia’s focus is to build larger private 5G Networks for ports, public safety and digital cities.
How will Nokia Southern Africa use its resources to drive innovation and enhance service delivery for 2025?
Nokia Southern Africa is actively contributing to innovation and service delivery in the region through several initiatives such as a joint innovation lab with our strategic partners, and advanced technical hubs in key countries which are serving our customer on a regional basis. We are further working on automation and AI driven operations topics to improve overall service delivery capability and its economics, as well as network planning and optimization services to ensure that Nokia partners can offer best-in-class experience to their customers. Lastly, cognizant of the paramount importance of health and safety, we collaborate with partners in taking the maximum steps to ensure strict adherence to all health and safety procedures for our service delivery capability in Southern Africa.
