Ericsson’s head of network solutions for Middle East and Africa Ahmad Husseini has predicted that Africa’s first 5G deployments would appear in a much shorter timescale than previous connectivity technologies had taken to reach the continent.
Hans Vestberg, Ericsson CEO Husseini referred to trends witnessed across previous generations of mobile technology to illustrate the continent would receive 5G relatively quickly.
“Looking at technology and focusing on Africa, the first GSM network was deployed in 1994, ten years later we had the first 3G system in Africa, and then just seven years later we had the first LTE network,” he explained.
“So it’s obvious that the pace is happening faster and faster and it’s taking a shorter time to deploy different technologies, so we believe that 5G will come to Africa much faster than other technologies.” He added that 5G on the continent would be “for industry use as much as it is for fast mobile data.”
You would recall that Ericsson and MTN announced what the companies claimed was the first trial of 5G in Africa at the operator’s headquarters in South Africa, whereby the solution demonstrated consisted of 3 radio units, baseband equipment, a 5G user equipment (UE) prototype with an external antenna, a vehicle with the UE installed, a 4K video camera and a VR Headset, demonstrating the performance of a low-latency network.
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