#AfricaCom Africa's digital economy on show

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The AfricaCom conference and expo offers a platform for the architects of Africa’s digital future to showcase technologies for Africa’s development. Huawei, a diamond sponsor of the three-day event under the theme, ‘Building a Better Connected Africa’, revealed its key focus areas that will accelerate the proliferation of digital services in the African continent.

Huawei focused on its core businesses and is committed to empowering carriers’ digital transformation with continuous strategic investment aiming at opening up platform capabilities to help carriers to build an open, collaborative, and win-win industry ecosystem to accelerate digital transformation.

On its demo and experience pavilion, it exhibited a wide range of solutions, such as Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IOT), Smart Home, Cloud ,Video, SDN/NFV, Safe City, and s on. These are designed to help African telecom carriers and enterprises transform their network into an agile and flexible one and to realise Operational Efficiency, Smart CAPEX and Business Transformation in the digital era.

Connectivity prevailes as the panacea for the deployment of digital services and applications for enterprises, government and carriers. From now until 2021, the Mobile Broadband (MBB) data traffic in Africa is expected to increase by at least 26-fold, mainly driven by applications such as video, IoT and by connecting the unconnected population.

Through its cloud platform and opening basic video capabilities, Huawei Video Solutions enables customers to develop video services in the quickest manner, deliver supreme user experiences at a cost that were never possible before. The Video Cloud will help customers to quickly bring video services online, reduces the time to market, and ensures the best user experience and data security.

The technology supports multiple service scenarios, assisting customers in quick commercial use of video services, promoting industry cooperation and building a win-win video ecosystem based on increasingly open video capabilities.

Africa’s digital economy

Huawei's IoT solutions which are currently being launched by many carriers in Africa will drive the digital transformation of carrier’s broadband services by making the world of connected things a reality. Huawei's LTE-based Narrow Broadband IoT (NB-IoT) technology will enable telecom operators in the region to deliver ubiquitous, cellular IoT. This technology will spark new business opportunities in smart metering, smart parking, logistics tracking, and smart cities in Africa.

Huawei’s Smart Home solution features a flexible architecture and access independence. It incorporates a smart home gateway to connect various smart home appliances, and an IoT connection management platform is required to enable various applications.

Connecting people in Africa remains a top priority. Huawei Marine is in partnership with 20 carriers to build eight new submarine cables systems and upgrade two existing systems in Africa to provide better international data access for 15 countries. To date, Huawei Marine is currently deploying the 6000 km repeatered South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) system between Cameroon and Brazil enabling connectivity for a population of 198 million.

In Addition, this year AfricaCom was an excellent platform for African thought leaders and industry experts, to explore the role of the ICT in driving Africa’s Digital Economy.

A growing number of countries are now focusing on capitalising on ICT technologies that better serve people, allow for more accurate and efficient decisions, and building a Digital Economy. Many countries have formulated their national ICT strategies and Huawei's focus is centered on building an open digital ecosystem with all industry partners in a wide range of activities such as ICT investment Planning, top-level Consulting, and ICT infrastructure prioritization in order to accelerate digital transformation within different African countries and industries, and promote thriving digital economies.

Huawei’s Southern Africa Region President Li Peng said, “This year Huawei has demonstrated that it is best positioned to play a pivotal role in supporting digital transformation and development of ICT in Africa. Today, we see that behind a globally competitive connectivity is a strong, collaborative industry chain with high levels of technological convergence and industry integration Huawei looks forward to working closely with industries and academia in the continent to create a better connected Africa.”