Autonomous networking is turbocharging MTN connectivity in South Africa

MTN’s Head of Network Operation and Transformation, Mohamed Salah, delivered a keynote speech at TM Forum’s annual Digital Transformation World (DTW) event.

• Click here to learn more about the autonomous networking technologies used by MTN.

Salah’s speech focused on network automation and in it he explained that MTN began its journey into the autonomous networks industry in 2021.

Since then, it has achieved several key milestones – allowing it to now focus on the commercial promotion of these services.

This includes MTN implementing 21 autonomous network use cases across five operating companies.

As part of his presentation, Salah unpacked two key autonomous networks case studies which detailed their work in partnership with Huawei.

Intelligent load-shedding management

Load-shedding has a huge impact on the ability to deliver connectivity in South Africa.

MTN has managed to navigate these power cuts thanks to autonomous networking, which allowed it to proactively manage its network to account for the variables of load-shedding.

Using load-shedding schedules, network traffic data, and site locations, MTN was able to intelligently schedule battery replacements, mobile generator deployments, and fuel refilling.

As a result of implementing this system, and in partnership with Huawei, MTN’s network availability has improved by 4%.

Best experience mobile backhaul

MTN takes its Net Promoter Score seriously, and as a result it prioritises establishing an unrivalled mobile backhaul network.

Previously, traffic engineering was a time-consuming way to avoid network congestion in an attempt to improve the provider’s network score.

Now, working with Huawei, MTN has implemented a network digital map to access real-time insights into key network resources such as pack lost rate (PLR), site availability, and link availability.

This allows for dynamic paths to be calculated and traffic flows to be optimised automatically.

MTN and Huawei’s network digital map technology has performed over 12,000-times the engineering that was previously done manually, and network traffic has increased by 15% since it was implemented.

MTN Head of Network Operation and Transformation, Mohamed Salah

Committed to network automation

Salah concluded his presentation by sharing MTN’s autonomous network framework blueprint.

He said that their knowledge will help other key role players understand MTN’s strategies and practices in the field of autonomous networks.

“MTN continues to innovate through value-based automation programs under our PACE technical strategy,” said Salah.

“This will help us improve our autonomous networking levels and capture the value of autonomous networks during this evolution journey.”

Click here to learn more about the autonomous networking technologies used by MTN.