MTN Group and Telecom Infra Project (TIP) have joined forces to support the evolution of MTN’s communication transport infrastructure, which will become a platform for future revenue growth and profitability.

“Our partnership with TIP will drive the specific requirements of our network to meet our subscriber demands, setting us apart on our network scalability and adaptability,” says Charles Molapisi, MTN Group Chief Technology and Information Officer.

Through the partnership, communication transport capacity will be deployed to support traffic growth over the next three years. In addition, it will provide support for new services as part of the evolution of 5G and new enterprise services. It will also reduce the time to market through more focused agile service provisioning.

“Through the use of open protocols and interfaces, and the ability to incorporate specific innovations focused on the performance of each network component, TIP’s open disaggregated, standard-based transport networks can help MTN move closer to its ideal transport infrastructure,” says David Hutton, TIP’s Chief Engineer.

The TIP community, which aggregates members across the whole transport network value chain, is a key tool for MTN to build its future transport infrastructure.

To achieve the objective of increasing network efficiency, MTN has identified a set of requirements named CASSI that will support its work by:

1.Convergent and congestion-free: Delivering on the capacity requirements from all network access technologies, including the most demanding, like accesses to fibre, next-generation radio systems, enterprise and consumer requirements.

2.Always on: Implementing a fully automated resilient transport network, to support high availability as demanded by advanced digital services.

3.Scalable: Allowing for an easy / efficient capacity expansion, able to accommodate fast-growing traffic demands at a lower cost.

4.Simplified: Making use of standardised network configurations and open protocols, to drive lower unit costs and increase capital expenditure efficiencies.

5.Intelligent: Automation of the network operations by using software to optimise network resource planning and management, achieving higher operational efficiencies by enabling use cases such as smart planning, auto-provisioning, network visualisation and forecasting and network slicing among others.

MTN will work together with the TIP community in the months ahead to build transport products and network configurations addressing the company’s requirements, that could be tested and validated in TIP’s community labs and in the field, to create easy-to-use commercial solutions for the CASSI use cases.