PARTNER CONTENT: Brandon Leigh, Founder and Group CEO of rain South Africa and Founder and Director of rainx, and Li Jie, President of Huawei 5G & LTE TDD Product Line, revealed how the duo’s network partnership is evolving to 5.5G in an effort to make the most of the AI opportunity.
Speaking in the WinWin Live extended reality studio at MBBF 2024 in Istanbul, Turkiye, Brandon explained South Africa is a large and diverse country geographically, offering many strengths as well as challenges in terms of coverage, noting fixed wireless access (FWA) has become “a very tricky exercise”. The operator started with 4G, which he suggested just wasn’t sufficient and now is moving to 5.5G. “5G FWA has been very successful for us, and we’re now already at 5.5G.”
Its current data-only offering gives consumers the option of 30MB, 60MB and 500+MB packages. “We have engineered CPEs to make sure connections are spectrally efficient and ensure customers have a good experience.”
Huawei’s Li noted building a strong 5G service requires four key components: coverage, experience, hotspot capacity and energy efficiency. “Huawei leads the 5G industry with extremely large antenna array (ELAA) technology and ‘0 Bit 0 Watt’ capability.”
The vendor deployed its 64T MetaAAU combining ELAA to maximise spectrum efficiency for rain. “That delivers a 3dB coverage gain and 30 per cent user experience improvement. Our latest AAU features “0 Bit 0 Watt”, which lowers power consumption by 30 per cent.”
Opex impact
For hotspot locations, Huawei also deployed its virtual 128T solution combined with 64T modules to double the number of channels, boosting coverage by more than 3dB and the capacity by 30 per cent to 60 per cent. “This supports better FWA service. For difficult site acquisition scenarios, we provide the BladeAAU solution for easy deployment with several bands in one box. It also can help rain reduce opex.”
Brandon said by implementing Huawei’s solutions it has solved a number of problems. “We delivered a high-capacity network and actually automated services and the CPE. Combined, we’ve seen our business grow about 80 per cent year-on-year.”
rain recently was awarded Best Operator Service by PwC. “We’re very proud to say that we actually have got a definite benefit for our customers as well. More customers and happier customers.”
In terms of product innovation, he doesn’t think an operator can be totally unique in its offerings. “That’s one of the benefits of telecoms. We learn from each other, and we learn from a global market.”
It is now targeting more premium and SME segments.
AI driven gains
Li noted the use of more AI-powered applications and devices will be key to enabling operators to start to offer users a guaranteed network experience.
Moving forward, he said all AI applications will require stable, low-latency, better uplink speeds and extremely high downlink rates. “This will be quite a challenge for the network, making 5.5G essential to provide a guaranteed performance with multiple bands. Huawei can provide innovative solutions like its dual-band MetaAAU, ultra-wideband mmWave AAU as well as AAUs for flexible deployment according to rain’s user-experience-centric strategy.”
A second vital component is intelligence for network, Li said. Huawei is focused on wireless intelligent agents and digital-based innovation to provide the best user experience in different scenarios.
A third factor is intelligent operations and maintenance with AI functions used to reduce the complexity of multi-band and multi-modal network planning and to increase the efficiency of network maintenance with AI-based human-machine interaction, he added.
“We will continue the joint innovation with rain to support new services deployment and to achieve greater business success,” Li stated.
Brandon believes the market has a lot of scope to grow. “Unfortunately, South Africa is still a market that needs a lot of fixed broadband services. But finally having 5.5G, we can actually deliver these services reliably, so we are super excited. I think there are a lot more applications to come, and we’re well positioned to maintain our growth.”
He noted rain has been at it for a long time, while some competitors are just entering the game. It launched 5G in 2019 and standalone 5G in 2020. “We’re not new to 5G. We’ve learned some difficult lessons on the way, that’s for sure, but we’re very excited.”
With all its learnings over the past few years, combined with the knowledge and experience of Huawei, he insists rain can deliver an even better service for customers.