Telecom Egypt picks Juniper and pens Sudatel connectivity deal
18 June 2021
Telecom Egypt has selected UK-headquartered Juniper Networks to upgrade and deploy a network capacity expansion across its national infrastructure, serving a customer base of 9.8m for fixed-line services, 6.9m for broadband and 7.3m for mobile.
The operator has embarked on a network upgrade strategy designed to add more capacity and flexibility through automation while staying in line with the Egyptian government’s Digital Egypt and ICT 2030 initiatives. The network will be equipped with 400G interfaces from Juniper’s purpose-built IP transport portfolio using custom silicon to meet the growing bandwidth capacity requirements in Egypt, the company said.
Find out more Musk’s Starlink ‘in advanced talks’ for Nigerian licence
18 June 2021
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in discussions with the NCC in order to obtain operating licences for its low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation Starlink.
Discussions appear to have progressed significantly, with SpaceX’s Starlink market access director for Africa, Ryan Goodnight, meeting NCC representatives in person recently to discuss the matter further.
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Egyptian regulator sanctions telecom operators
18 June 2021
Egypt’s telecom regulator sanctioned five major operators a total of E£20.65m or US$1.3m, for breaching the mobile number portability regulations.
The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) fined the incumbent operator Telecom Egypt E£3.9m, Etisalat Misr E£3.95m, Orange Egypt E£5.8m and Vodafone Egypt E£7m.
NTRA said the violations “were mainly related to the unjustified rejection of MNP requests, the unavailability of response to MNP requests within 24 hours from the date of investigation, or the non-activation of the number on the operator’s network after MNP”.
Find out more Testing the network
08 June 2021
The need for high-performance increases by the day, courtesy of IoT streaming and other demands and so must the rate of network optimisation. As far as operators are concerned, monitoring user activity (no, not snooping) and experience along with sending alerts immediately upon detecting network and service instabilities can drastically reduce the negative effect that network problems have on end-user applications.
When voice, data, video and messaging services fail to deliver the expected quality levels, network and service operations centres need to be notified instantly to take prompt action. This is particularly important in critical hotspots such as shopping malls, airports, commercial centres, train stations, highly-populated areas, key commuting routes and public transport.
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