MTN Upgrades Network to deliver Quad-Play Services

Tuesday, 01 April 2008 13:02  |  Massimo Migliuolo, Cisco Systems

Leading African and Middle Eastern mobile operator MTN is experiencing rapid growth. When the company first started operations in South Africa in 1994 the view was that the total market there would be up to approximately 250,000 subscribers. By the middle of 2007 the South African market was sitting at about 33 million subscribers out of a total population of 46 million. MTN's share is 14 million subscribers - around 42% of the total.

MTN Innovation Centre

Many other things have changed in the intervening years. MTN's ambitions do not end with South Africa. The company now has operations in 21 countries throughout Africa and the Middle East, including Nigeria where its subscriber numbers are equal to those in South Africa. MTN has been aggressively rolling out services in Ghana, Iran, the Cameroons, Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria, all of which have seen double digit growth in subscriber numbers during 2007.

Dealing with ‘hyper-growth' on this scale places unprecedented demands on management structures, financial and operating systems as well as on network infrastructure. The situation has been further exacerbated by intense competition from other operators. This has the effect of driving growth in demand for more sophisticated mobile services and applications.

According to Santie Botha, MTN's Executive Director of Marketing, "As the world grows and changes and your market gets more sophisticated and you have more choice, data becomes a major issue. And with data comes content and connectivity. Then as mobile TV comes into play, really the sky's the limit."

Santie Botha

As MTN's vision to be the leading telecoms operator in Africa and the Middle East developed it became clear that the launch a content platform was critical to achieving this vision. The company realised it was essential to be first to market with multimedia services including video streaming, calling and conferencing in order to maintain its market leadership position.

Botha again: "Launching a comprehensive content platform was critical for our operations in Africa and the Middle East. With the ability to deliver voice, video and data to our customers over a single network we are really helping customers leapfrog the digital divide where they will not need a laptop to connect to the internet - they can get it all on the mobile device".

To meet these demands and to help improve customer satisfaction and experience, MTN called in Cisco. The basis of Cisco's approach was to help reduce network complexity and management costs. MTN is delivering a suite of data, voice and video services over a highly available and scalable IP Next-Generation Network, the core of which is based on the Cisco CRS-1 routing system.

The CRS-1 helps MTN to eliminate the complexity and costs associated with managing numerous disparate networks running separate services and maintains the highest level of network availability. The Cisco CRS-1 has also helped MTN to evolve its network to deliver the next generation of mobile IP services, such as mobile TV.

Sidney Arnold, General Manager of Systems Planning at MTN who was in charge of the technical side of the project could see that Cisco's next-gen network would allow the company to meet the challenges on a single cost-effective and reliable network. "The reason to go forward onto the CRS Cisco platform was because we could see it offered one holistic network that we could put all the different services across. We wanted to get into the new domain of triple play where customers want voice, data and video services. Cisco next generation network brings us a favourable network and meets the needs to take MTN into the future.

"Today, customers want a significant amount of data services available to them via their mobile phones. Traditionally, we had a number of complex disparate networks delivering services to our customers, which were extremely expensive to manage," said Arnold. "We estimate that if we had not deployed a Cisco platform we would have had to increase our infrastructure 10-fold in the core network just to carry all the different services to meet customer needs."

CRS-1

Using an IP network as the platform helps MTN to deploy new services to customers quickly with minimal risk and capital investment. In addition to delivering multimedia services to mobile phone users, a single, converged IP Next Generation Network has also helped MTN establish itself as a broadband provider, delivering wireless Internet services to the home, and to small and medium-sized businesses.

The benefits are not limited to increased business activity. A huge range of social benefits are flowing from the move to IP based next generation networks. Many countries in the emerging markets are undergoing a transition from slow growth and limited connectivity to hyper-growth. In some instances this results in leapfrogging legacy technology and surpassing the infrastructure in more developed countries. Cisco and MTN are now working closely across Africa and the Middle East to engage with countries, businesses and individual citizens alike to help provide the socio-economic transformation that many strive for.

According to Paul Mountford, Cisco's Senior Vice President for Emerging Markets "Cisco and MTN share the belief that emerging markets hold tremendous opportunities of growth. As a trusted partner of MTN, the relationship between the two companies will continue to yield technology and service excellence for realising business and social benefits for our joint markets."

The next major challenge for MTN and Cisco is the 2010 Soccer World Cup, which will be hosted by South Africa. MTN are a major event sponsor and appreciate the need to position themselves from a technology point of view to meet the immense bandwidth demands that will almost certainly be required at the time. In terms of preparation for 2010 MTN are in no doubt as to the importance of equipping themselves with the best possible technology and the best possible partners. Obviously Cisco is one of these.

For the last word we go back to Santie Botha: "People talk about bridging the digital divide; this is really leapfrogging the digital divide where you don't actually need a laptop; you can have a mobile device in your hand and you'll get it all."

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More info:

• http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns341/networking_solutions_service_provider_home.html

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