ICT-ET (Information and Communication Technology association of Ethiopia) is an association set to EXPOSE, ENGAGE and ENABLE the private sector involved in Information Technology, Communication Technology and Broadcasting Technology within Ethiopia. This association recently collaborated with GIZ to better digital education in Ethiopia and on the 26th of November 2020 these two organizations held a meeting with university teachers, private IT company, TVET staff and others using the theme, “bridging the gap between the IT industry and academia.”
The meeting kicked off with a welcoming and opening speech from the vice president of ICTET, Yilkal Abate and four key areas were addressed during the course of the meeting, namely; digital skills framework development, giving standard reading material for basic skill, Internship placement for fresh graduate and digital scouts (junior distance learning expert). The first agenda “digital skill development framework” encompasses online learning, giving enough digital training for teachers and as such. The second agenda “give standard reading material for basic digital skill” entails how to search online, use the internet, use excel and basic understanding about privacy and security.
The third agenda “internship placement for fresh graduates” in highlight is about training fresh graduates in the IT industry. The association will arrange several companies where the trainees can learn and evolve beside their area of expertise. They learn how to communicate, work independently as well as in groups and help expand their interpersonal connection, which helps them get a job or even start a start-up and in turn, train other fresh graduates.
The fourth agenda titled “digital scouts” deals with E-learning and is geared towards helping students learn despite of their geographical location. Around the finale of the meeting, Interns talked about their experience at the association and how it benefited them. The conference was finalized by awarding certificate for those who have completed their Internship.
Bridging the IT industry and Academia
Strides ahead: How 5G will become the new frontier of sports
Kevin Murphy, Vice President and Head of Ericsson Levant Countries and Global Customer Unit Ooredoo
Sports fans are a passionate breed and whether they’re at the match or on their couches, they demand the full experience. For fans, and athletes alike, leading technologies enrich the sporting experience, bringing people closer to the action, and creating new immersive ways to showcase the commitment, excitement, and teamwork of sports.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a growth in digital experiences which may become permanent. The increase in virtual events is raising the bar for the quality and design of the experience, with audiences becoming increasingly sophisticated, demanding a more social, innovative and engaging event.
To transform the digital experience for fans, players and support staff alike, three main types of support is required: a sports performance information system; a digital experience backend system; and technology consulting and innovation services.
The combination of 5G, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) supports completely new user experiences in sports – pushing boundaries and taking the consumer to the heart of the game itself. For a team playing before a packed stadium or a lonesome runner on a forest track, connectivity and mobility enable new values in an emerging internet of sport.
This is where 5G can be a vital tool for the sports sector, as it seeks to re-invent the fan experience at home and at the sports arena. Sporting events could better serve both the traveling fan attending every game in person and the die-hard fan catching the game remotely.
In this age of digital and mobile consumption, fans expect an experience boosted by their mobile devices. Through live-streaming video, mixed reality experiences and real-time access to information about the game, the next generation in mobile wireless technology can create an enhanced experience, reinventing how fans participate in sports.
Immersive Sporting Experiences at Home
Sports fans today are looking for new ways to connect to the sporting experience digitally. There is potential to create more immersive fan experiences with the introduction of 360-degree cameras, virtual and augmented reality. Fans can walk the sideline, see what the goalkeepers are seeing or join the victory celebration in the locker room – all serving the purpose of bringing fans closer to the action at the venue from home.
What’s more, the trend of increased solitary viewing due to the development of personal screens and on-demand viewing could be reversed thanks to the capabilities and promises of Virtual Reality (VR). It can provide a way to connect with friends watching the game at different physical locations, creating a “virtual hangout” for the times you can’t be there in person.
VR also brings an exciting prospect to the table: the ability to watch 4K/UHD content without owning a big physical screen and allowing on-demand viewing to become more of a social activity than it is today. Soon, friends and people with similar interests can watch content together in a VR living room, viewers will have the freedom to look anywhere in every scene of a movie and consumers can experience a football match with other fans in a VR arena, as if they are actually there.
And for sports fans in areas that don’t have access to fiber coverage, 5G enables fixed wireless access applications for very high-quality video streaming in 4K video, 360 or AR/VR formats.
This means that you get to watch the 4K video on your mobile device. But 5G is also so fast and so reliable that it will make fixed wireless a real challenger in the broadband market, streaming 4K video wirelessly to your big screen TV as well. And it’s not just the quality either. You’ll be able to choose what camera angles you like, or if you want information overlaid on the screen, or if you want to watch in VR or not.
Creating the Connected Stadium
A great experience at the arena is fundamental to enjoying live sports. Where fans today see broadband connectivity to their smartphone for social media posts as table stakes, there is so much more that could be done digitally to connect fans to the action. This is an area where 5G can improve the overall experience, compared to standard WIFI solutions.
5G can expand the experience for fans at the game, creating new possibilities by connecting sensors in balls, goals, and even players – all in real-time with extremely low latency. The next generation technology can deliver enough capacity to the stadium for fans to stream high-quality video and share the views from their seats with others at the same match.
Other future changes coming to the fan experience with 5G connectivity include the ability to experience matches from new vantage points, using phones to switch between different 360-degree, ultra-high definition virtual reality cameras filming all around the stadium.
The introduction of 5G at a stadium also creates a horizontal platform to serve additional applications. Fans would be able to monitor and track athletes’ performance during practice and competition in real time, for example. This represents a major opportunity for service providers to deliver enhanced networks in stadiums and arenas to ensure their subscribers are well connected.
Smart Networks key to supporting Africa’s Digital Agenda
Interview with Lucky La Riccia, Vice President and Head of Digital Services for Ericsson Middle East and Africa
What is the role of smart networks in terms of supporting Africa’s digital agenda?
Africa’s Digital agenda is a base for economic opportunities across all industry sectors, with the continent’s young population driving enormous opportunities in this digital era.
Service providers in Africa are seizing the opportunity to evolve their role in the value chain and build powerful technological capabilities that can dramatically accelerate the digital transformation of companies across industries and geographies.
With networks of the future, the complexity of operating networks will go far beyond what any human can manage. To leverage the full benefits, investing in additional technologies such as cloud native, orchestration and automation is now business critical.
Working at the core of network evolution, core networks need to be high-performing, automated and highly programmable – the key to enabling network slicing and edge computing, allowing for new revenue streams. In addition, we help Service Providers need to decrease time-to-market and capitalize on new services, through leading consumer and enterprise communication and monetization solutions, enabling them to stay ahead in the race for both consumer and enterprise business, today and tomorrow.
Smart networks are able to handle more complexity, elevated data flows and increased speed. They should be able to onboard new mobile services and deploy and run cost efficient voice networks based on cloud technology. This cloud technology should also allow for a whole new set of services, applying edge capabilities and virtualized networks that allows for network slicing and the ability to break down network services into microservices, supported by Continuous Integration and Deployment to rapidly effect any change with higher quality.
How can you leverage cloud technologies to strengthen core networks?
Meeting network services requirements in the future by upgrading an existing Evolved Packet Core is not alone enough. Achieving the necessary scalability, flexibility and performance requires a cloud-native, service-based core architecture that includes separate user and control planes and high-bit rate provisioning.
Cloud Native and Cloud Native Infrastructure is all about best practices. Continuous integration and deployment, containers and microservices help achieve the elastic scaling capabilities, speed of introducing new functionality and increased automation needed to cater for an unpredictable competitive landscape.
Take Ericsson’s cloud native and automation technologies in core networks as an example. We have found by leveraging these technologies, up to 20% operational savings can be achieved on infrastructure as well as up to 90% reduction in OPEX for software upgrades.
Tell us about the importance of BSS as operators evolve from a service provider to a service creator role?
Digitization will give communications service providers the opportunity to evolve their role in the value chain. Opening up opportunities beyond consumer markets, communications service providers need to provide increasing value from their network infrastructure, provide tailored connectivity solution through a digital platform for both consumer and business customers to build their own processes and offers including massive IoT and providing new digital services to collaborate on use cases beyond just communications.
A stepwise BSS capabilities evolution will prove to be the key accelerator of communications service providers as they seek to monetize digitization and its new opportunities. An evolved BSS will need to support all standards through to 5G, features like virtualization and network slicing, while maintaining all of the end-to-end business capabilities. It also needs to handle devices at IoT scale while supporting new revenue models and billing-on-behalf. The capacity to expose network capabilities as well as both BSS and OSS capabilities are critical for service providers to be able to deliver on service creation beyond telecoms. These multiple partnerships require new supporting business models that allow flexible charging, revenue sharing and billing.
Use case driven, BSS offerings will require the capability to very quickly define, deploy and adapt new offerings to capture new opportunities, providing partners with tools that can request network capabilities, present configuration options, determine prices and orchestrate the order – all in real time and without human intervention.
Considering the rise of Mobile Money in Africa, how do financial services fit into smarter networks?
Smarter Monetization also includes a Mobile Financial Services offering. This is an especially important solution for Africa to help bring the unbanked into the formal financial sector in this continent.
With Mobile Financial Services, the ability to save, repay debts, and enable entrepreneurships can be provided simply by providing access to the formal financial system. We are proud that Ericsson contributes to the increased usage of Mobile Financial Services with our flagship Ericsson Wallet Platform.
Any Wallet Platform needs to offer the highest levels of security and ease of use amongst many other advantages to enable smarter business specially as we witness an increase in contactless payments related to the (COVID-19) pandemic.
Smarter Business means a Wallet Platform can launch relatively quickly with basic services that serve the purpose to build upon existing customer relationships, services such as remittance, bank transfers and utility payments while allowing future growth into differentiator services that stimulate stickiness and brand position with mobile consumers.
Our Ericsson wallet platform serves more than 254 million registered wallets to date with close to 20 billion USD monthly circulation in this market thanks to combining the high-performance telco level and high secure financial level capabilities into one platform.
Africa in Motion: Driving innovation, economic growth & societal inclusion
By: Nora Wahby, Vice President and Head of Ericsson West Africa & Morocco
All around the world, digital transformation is becoming a critical factor in long-term, sustainable economic development, and Africa is no exception. With two decades of experience behind me, I feel a lot of pride in being part of a digital transformation journey with Ericsson which allows me to share my love of technology and how it can accelerate socio-economic prosperity towards the people of Africa.
We, at Ericsson, believe that ICT has the ability to level the global playing field and enable African countries to harness the full potential of their human capital. Almost two years ago, I landed in Africa for my first business trip to meet the team and customers in Senegal. Not only did the career move appeal to my sense of adventure and exploration, I was excited about the life-changing experiences about to unfold.
I did not know about the culture except few stories from my father who had visited Dakar in the 80s and who talked a lot about the kindness of the people and how much he loved the food, the music and the colors.
As a business leader, my personal purpose ties very well into Ericsson’s vision in accelerating the broadband adoption in Africa. Ericsson’s vision calls for us to connect the unconnected because we believe that access to communication is a basic human need. We believe people in rural parts of Africa will benefit greatly from mobile connectivity, which greatly increases access to information and services that support health, education and small businesses.
In a world where all Africans have access to quality education and health service, this young continent will keep beating with endless opportunities building on a rich heritage, a vibrant culture and a young population dreaming of the future. Driven by a desire to better understand the needs of mobile users in Africa and provide them with specialized services, I committed to the vision of an empowered Africa through technology, innovation and the principles of digital inclusion. In my heart I’m determined to put #AfricaInMotion
A Connected Africa
Operating in a very mature and competitive market that has grown significantly in the last ten years, telecommunication service providers in Africa are playing an increasingly important role in helping both governments and cities deepen their understanding about the concrete steps they can take to increase Africa’s competitiveness in the global economy through supporting and encouraging the increased use of ICT.
Connectivity not only offers great potential to transform cities and industries, but it also fosters inclusion and makes a positive, sustainable economic impact. With the ambition of supporting the acceleration of Africa’s digitization journey, we are working jointly with our customers – the service providers – and other stakeholders across the continent to enable #AfricaInMotion. The campaign highlights the continent’s potential to accelerate digital adoption and leapfrog into a new era of socio-economic prosperity.
One example is financial inclusion through the use of digital technology as an essential element in furthering the economic development of Africa. Mobile money services have become an essential, life-changing tool across the continent for both women and men, providing access to safe and secure financial services but also to energy, health, education and employment opportunities.
In my opinion, putting this campaign into action for Ericsson is key to strengthening Africa’s digital future underpinned by connectivity. Also, I am greatly encouraged by the fact that our attempt to foster inclusion and bridge the digital divide carries significant potential to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Africa.
Spurring Post-Pandemic Economic Recovery
During an unprecedented crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, the value of fixed and mobile networks as the backbone of our society has become more apparent than ever before. Given the current speed and capacity of cellular networks with LTE, there are opportunities for African service providers to deliver broadband services to homes and small and medium-sized enterprises economically using Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). Several factors are driving the FWA market in Africa and beyond: demand from consumers and businesses for digital services along with government-sponsored programs and subsidies.
Africa had my heart from Day 1, with its natural beauty, rich culture and friendly people. I have always felt welcome here. I am convinced that high-speed mobile connectivity will be instrumental in providing a stable platform for innovation and economic growth in the continent, not least when we factor in the big potential that is still untapped by unlocking ecosystems and digitalizing our industry verticals such as the health sector, energy and utilities, transportation, agriculture, etc.
With the help of smart, long-term investments in infrastructure – including mobile broadband, fixed wireless access and fintech services.
