NSN zain partnership shows leadership

Nokia Solutions and Networks and Zain Group have successfully partnered for nearly two decades with one sole objective - ensuring world-class service experience for Zain's customers. Marking this fruitful partnership, NSN demonstrated its advanced mobile broadband solutions at the Zain Technology Conference (ZTC) 2013 on Dec 1-3, 2013 in Dubai, UAE. NSN has been a main infrastructure supplier to buildZain Group's GSM, 3G and 4G network. Over the years NSN has evolved as the world's specialist in mobile broadband and continues to provide its superior mobile broadband infrastructure including its Customer Experience Management (CEM) and services to Zain Group. NSN's solutions demonstrated at the conference include its Liquid Applications, Active Antenna Systems, Voice over LTE (VoLTE), Congestion Aware Packet Core, CEM, NetAct, Service Quality Manager (SQM), Operations on Demand, and intelligent Self-Organizing Networks (iSON). In the longstanding partnership from 1994, when Zain's first GSM network in Kuwait was built, NSN continues to support Zain Group to be a market leader in the Middle East region. Throughout the long and successful partnership, NSN delivered its superior mobile broadband technologies to transform Zain Group's network cost-efficiently to ensure the best service experience for its customers. Among other important deployments, these technologies include the first CEM deployment for Zain Kuwait in 2011, unique operations support systems (OSS) portfolio deployed for touch Lebanon in 2013, for both of which NSN was awarded the prestigious Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards 2013, and LTE network deployed for Zain Saudi Arabia (Zain KSA) in 2012. Also, for the last five years, NSN has been providing its Special Event Support Services (SESS) to Zain KSA's GSM, 3G, and 4G network during the Hajj event. NSN's SESS helps Zain KSA meet the increased demand for network capacity and avoid any degradation in network performance during the exceptional traffic and load conditions during the yearly mega event. "NSN has been one of the main pillars of our success stories in the region," saidScott Gegenheimer, CEO of Zain Group. "NSN has provided its superior mobile broadband network including radio and core networks to build a reliable GSM, 3G, and 4G network for us in the region. It's CEM platform is one of its innovative technologies that helped us transform the service experience of our customers cost-efficiently." "We are committed to helping Zain Group satisfy its customers and be a market leader by providing the best voice and data services and," Igor Leprince, Senior Vice-President, Middle East and Africa, NSN. "NSN will continue to support the operator with our latest mobile broadband innovations for radio and core network such as core virtualization including telco cloud innovations and enhanced voice call continuity for VoLTE. With our focus on innovations

source: www.hispanicbusiness.com

India is vodafone's 2nd largest country in data traffic, 3G is 30% of data traffic

India is now Vodafone’s second largest business in terms of data traffic. This was disclosed by Vodafone Group CTO Steve Pusey during the company’s earnings conference call last week.

He added that India accounted for around 40 petabytes of the total 85 petabytes data traffic in the AMAP (Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific Region) region in the first half year, doubling year on year (YoY).

Last week, the telco had reported a moderate increase in its data subscriptions, clocking 42.5 million data subscriptions of which 4.5 million were 3G subscriptions. The data revenues however had declined to £111 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2013, down from £123 million in the previous quarter.

Later in the call, Nick Read, Vodafone CEO (Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific Region) said its 3G browsing revenues are up 190% for this quarter and the smartphone penetration of its customer base has increased by 40% since the start of FY14. 3G traffic now accounts for 30% of the total data traffic. ”We see a massive opportunity now in terms of ARPU uplift, and in terms of further growth coming from India for the operators that are willing to put significant investment in data networks, especially in the urban areas.”

- Vodafone plans to setup 27,000 3G sites and extend its outdoor 3G coverage to over 90% of urban areas in India. The company also plans to extend its 3G coverage to 200 new towns in the country. There are also plans to setup 14,000 2G sites and roll out 14,000 km of fibre across 40 Indian cities, which will be extended t0 100 cities later.

- Read noted the top three operators have started to increase their existing market share and currently account for 66% of the revenues for the quarter. “As the smaller players, the more vulnerable players, leave the circles, or the market completely, we are able to grab more of the minutes and more of the customers in a dual SIM environment”.

source: medianama.com