Viewpoint
One of the largest Communication Service Providers (CSP) in Africa, MTN Group, recently launched Ambition 2025 to build on its inherent strengths and to be better able to leverage its network assets and platforms.
MTN’s Ambition 2025 vision was formed for "building the largest and most valuable platform business with a clear focus on Africa."
"Notwithstanding the many challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, MTN delivered a solid H1, exceeding most of the Group’s medium-term targets through sustained commercial momentum as we executed on our Ambition 2025 strategy," said MTN Group President and Chief Executive Officer Ralph Mupita.
With more than 277 million subscribers in 20 countries in Africa, the telco believes that the Ambition 2025 strategy will help it to further grow and accelerate its growth in the region. MTN’s Ambition 2025 strategy is designed to build on its largest fixed and mobile network in Africa and a vast distribution network. Further, it has a strong brand loved by the people in Africa and a large subscriber base.
"This [Ambition 2025 strategy] will rest on a scale connectivity and infrastructure business, making use of both mobile and fixed access networks across the consumer, enterprise and wholesale segments. The implementation of this growth strategy will be accelerated through selective partnerships and leveraging MTN’s brand as the most trusted and valued in Africa, while it will be supported and funded through enhanced cost and capex efficiencies," says MTN’s mission.
It is here that MTN’s partnership with Huawei will play a crucial role in realizing the vision of Ambition 2025.
Leveraging Autonomous Networks
Central to MTN’s Ambition 2025 strategy is the use of network automation to benefit from existing network assets. MTN aims to move the autonomous level across all of its OpCos across Africa gradually to the Level 4 milestone by 2025, which is designated to a system that enables, analyzes and makes decisions based on predictive or active closed-loop management of service and customer experience-driven networks as defined by the TM Forum.
The Ambition 2025 strategy is operationalized with the autonomous network framework. With the help of the Huawei Autonomous Driving Network (ADN) solution, the company is realizing the vision for autonomous networks with self-serving, self-fulfilling, self-assuring capabilities to provide zero wait, zero-touch and zero trouble experience.
The framework is based on a foundation of best-in-class network infrastructure, which provides network awareness thus allowing better decision capability. This is crucial to support domain intelligence and autonomy with the manager, controller and analyzer in each of the autonomous domain.
For the implementation of the framework on the service layer, MTN is working on three key approaches: developing use cases, developing an Autonomous Network (AN) blueprint that guides all operations to realize MTN Group strategy and developing AN Level (ANL) evaluation.
MTN Group Successfully Completes Two Critical Trials
MTN recently conducted two crucial trials of the Sleeping Cells Self-Healing Solution and the Intelligent IP Private Line Solution based on the Huawei ADN solution on its journey to autonomous networks.
The trials were conducted on live networks in South Africa for the first time in December 2021. This was also the first time such a trial was held in Africa. The event marks a new chapter for MTN regarding network autonomy and intelligence capability, empowering its Ambition 2025 strategy.
Based on Huawei’s ADN solution, MTN announced the deployment of innovative use cases for sleeping cells self-healing with cross-domain fault automation for Radio Access Network (RAN) services. Earlier it was not possible to detect cell level outage because of sleeping cells. This resulted in downtime and poor response. However, Huawei’s sleeping cells self-healing solution automates the monitoring, diagnosis and recovery of sleeping cells. This is known to address over 80% of the poor service because of sleeping cells.
On the other hand, the cross-domain fault automation capability automatically diagnoses the alarms and analyses the root causes of the problems to bring down the resolution time.
Consequently, this is helping MTN prevent revenue loss, increase operational efficiency and strengthen network intelligence and automation. All this empowers MTN to accelerate digital transformation of its operations and networks.
The live-network test of the intelligent IP private line solution completed a series of use cases, including one-stop service provisioning, tenant-level Service Level Agreement (SLA) assurance, on-demand capacity expansion, and proactive operations and maintenance.
MTN Group is also working with Huawei to build a new cloud-oriented network architecture and non-blocking agile bearer network. this is based on the MTN Ambition 2025 network strategy and "CASSI" as the delivery framework.
MTN is working on developing ADN solution capabilities to achieve self-fulfilling, self-healing, self-optimizing capabilities so it is able to deliver truly zero-touch, zero-wait, zero-trouble user experiences. This is crucial to deliver top-notch network performance in line with the changing requirement of the digital customer.
Huawei’s ADN solution is playing a crucial role in helping MTN realize the vision of Ambition 2025 to build Africa’s largest and most valuable digital network platform. MTN Group will continue to work on innovations of Autonomous Networks to gain new efficiencies for improved operations. It also empowers MTN to extend the benefits of connected life to all segments of the African population and contribute to the region’s overall social and economic growth.
