Seven telecom experts have finish their “connectivity tour,” an epic journey that began in 2019 at MWC and took them across Africa. After a phenomenal five-month road trip across Africa, a group of telecom experts from London-based Cellusys, a telecom cybersecurity and consulting firm, arrived in Cape Town on Friday.
Telecom Experts Finish Their Epic Journey Across Africa
The chairman of the company Dawood Ghalaieny was the driving force behind the mammoth road trip, which started in Barcelona. During the trip, the Cellusys team was able to learn more about the working environment and how its clients, like MTN Group, must operate to deliver connectivity services to different parts of the continent.
Due to the rapid development of the sector, Africa is being closely watched. The region is strange in certain respects, but the world community recognizes the possibilities,” said Cellusys solutions engineer Luanna Sena in a Friday TechCentral interview. “We were able to interact with various cultures, get to know the locals, and see the structural difficulties that African mobile operators face.”
Members of the Seven Group
The group of seven consisted of a mechanic, social media managers, marketers, and solution engineers, and they all drove Toyota Land Cruisers. Sena, a Brazilian native who now resides in London, and her colleagues were pleased with the degree of connectivity they had during their trip while seeing differences in connectivity across various locations.
She said, “In some countries, we had 4G all the way through, others only had 3G, but there are some places where there is absolutely nothing.”
Mobile Operators’ Infrastructure Investments
However, infrastructure has improved. She and her group saw that there is connectivity everywhere they go where there is a road system. This shows that mobile operators can use the investments made by other infrastructure providers to support their business case for rolling out infrastructure, which is evidence of the cascading effect that one kind of investment can have on spurring expansion in another.
Similarly, the mobile operators’ infrastructure investments have produced an environment that supports “over-the-top” (OTT) services. The Cellulys team had firsthand experience with the mobile money services provided by mobile carriers, which are the most significant of these for Africa.
Sena stated that although mobile money is available in her native Brazil, it is not as popular as she has seen it to be throughout Africa. However, as the continent’s connectivity increases, it becomes more noticeable where other digital services that are essential for daily life are falling short.
Local Stakeholders Facilitates Successful Company Operations
Google Maps estimated that it would take 40 minutes to get to our destination at one point in the trip, but it took three or four hours. If we hadn’t driven so slowly, we would have totaled the vehicles. We got bogged in several spots, so the locals had to come to shake the cars out of the muck and give us a shove,” Sena remarked. “We eventually learned to listen to the locals and not follow the GPS after experiencing this five or six times.”
The Cellusys team gained firsthand knowledge of the idea that engaging and consulting local stakeholders facilitates successful company operations in Africa. Order Kasi CEO Leon Qwabe made a similar argument about operating in township communities at a recent webinar about e-commerce in South Africa. He also mentioned that Google Maps data has to be updated in specific places.
Team Interacted with Gorillas Were Being Rehabilitated
Sena reported that the team saw amazing deeds of kindness and breathtaking experiences while traveling. She also mentioned how much fun it was. 75 children participated in a coding boot camp that was started in Ghana. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the team interacted with gorillas who were being rehabilitated for the wild while having 2G access in the middle of a dense jungle. “There, the more recent, fancy phones weren’t as connected as the older feature phones.”
Sena and her colleagues now have a more nuanced perspective of their job concerning Africa overall, she said, thanks to the time they spent traveling the continent and engaging with its people.
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