Africa is one of the world’s fastest growing mobile telephony markets, contributing 23 million of the 105 million new mobile subscriptions measured globally by Ericsson in Q4 2014, and reported in the February 2015 Ericsson Mobility Report.
To better serve both operators and end users across the continent, Ericsson is building a new network operations centre in Lagos, Nigeria, and expanding the capabilities of its existing facility in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The capabilities provided by the network operations centres will include engineering, operations and customer experience management.
Ultimately, the facilities in Nigeria and Ivory Coast will help Ericsson’s customers in Africa make the transition from managing network performance to managing the quality of end-user services such as voice, web browsing and video streaming.
Lagos and Abidjan were selected as the sites for the network operations centers due to the availability of talent, infrastructure and connectivity, and will act as hubs used to manage networks across the rest of Africa. Fredrik Jejdling, head of region sub-Saharan Africa at Ericsson, said: “As the country in Africa with both the largest population and the largest economy, Nigeria was the logical choice as the host country for our newest network operations center. Together with the expanded facility in Ivory Coast, this center will allow us to continue a proud tradition of more than 100 years working with our customers in Africa.”
Expected to be operational by Q3 2015, the network operations centres will help operators keep pace with rapid socio-economic and technological changes in Sub-Saharan Africa – a region that had 635 million subscriptions in 2014 and is expected to have 930 million subscriptions by the end of 2019. Ericsson is the global leader in telecommunications managed services, managing networks for multiple operators worldwide via a combination of global and local network operations centers. Ericsson employs 66,000 services professionals in 180 countries, and provides managed services for networks that serve more than 1 billion subscribers.
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