World: One Billion Subscribers Benefit from Ericsson’s Managed Services
By NewsfromAfrica
Ericsson has attained another milestone as more than 40 percent of the world’s mobile traffic currently passes through Ericsson networks, meaning that 1 billion mobile subscribers are now served by networks that are managed by Ericsson on behalf of operators around the world.
Africa has played a large role in Ericsson reaching these impressive growth records, with the phenomenal ICT explosion we are seeing across the continent, the company manages networks that serve more than 50 million subscribers and over the past 3 years has produced 3 of the largest deals covering 24 countries.
Ericsson’s infrastructure also supports customer networks that serve more than 2.5 billion subscribers. The figures are significant given that analysts expect 9.3 billion mobile subscriptions by 2018.
Magnus Mandersson, Ericsson’s executive vice president and head of business unit global services, says: “We’re very proud to have passed the 1 billion subscriber milestone, as this confirms our leadership in managed services. We achieved this goal by earning the trust of our customers with our high-performance operations and processes and our skilled people, which are at the heart of Ericsson’s services business. This milestone is just one of many on the journey we have undertaken. The next step is to make the transition from traditional managed services to Experience Centric Managed Services.”
To achieve global scale, Ericsson has invested more than US $ 1 billion in tools, methods and processes for service delivery and established Global Service Centers in Romania, Mexico, India and China to deliver managed services remotely for a large number of networks across the globe.
Ericsson pioneered managed services for the telecoms sector and continues to be the frontrunner in this area. With well over 15 years of experience in managing multi-vendor, multi-technology networks, Ericsson industrialized the concept of delivering managed services for multiple operators through outstanding Global Service Centers and a strong field service organization.
Ericsson is also the leader in Africa for Managed Services, a position that was strengthened earlier this year when it was announced that Atlantique Telecom, part of Etisalat Group, awarded Ericsson a 5-year multi-country managed services contract to span the continent. This partnership spreads across Western and Central Africa and supports Etisalat’s focus on leading a new generation of operations in Africa while supporting the company’s value added services and offerings.
In Africa, Ericsson in 2012 signed a deal with Airtel to undertake an end-to-end network transformation program across Airtel mobile operations in 16 African countries including Kenya. The program, which is the largest of its kind on the African continent, involves a comprehensive upgrade and expansion of network elements on all of Airtel’s African operations, including switching, radio, network management, data, charging, and consumer-services platforms and systems.
This network transformation program, under which Ericsson has deployed latest wireless technologies, will enhance Airtel’s network capacity and robustness and help deliver best-in-class services to customers at affordable rates. This also makes Airtel’s networks fully ready for next generation services that include high speed data and value added services.
In addition, a full upgrade of the charging platforms across all operations was implemented introducing the latest version of Ericsson’s Charging System, enabling Airtel to offer subscribers new and innovative value-added services such as mobile wallets. The project is meant to enhance the user experience for Airtel Africa’s over 60 million customers. Ericsson has other contracts with Safaricom, Orange as well as Essar Telecom’s yuKenya for provision of various services.
“Managed services is about people and competence, and over the years more than 25,000 employees have transferred to Ericsson from operators around the world. Ericsson is continuously looking for new ways to help its customers put their customers first. We believe that – in addition to enhancing innovation, agility and speed – managed services can enable operators to focus on specialization and place a greater emphasis on user experience and customer relationships,” said Mr Mandersson.
Ericsson is also pioneering the development of the Experience Centric Managed Services model, which offers operators benefits such as continuous service improvement, reduced time to market, access to technical competence, and a shared focus on user experience. The end result is satisfied users, lower subscriber churn rates, higher average revenue per user and a more cost-efficient operation.