Category: Africa

SUZHOU, China, Oct. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — The 41st GITEX Technology Week in Dubai, the largest technology show in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, was held from October 17-21, attracting many internationally renowned IT companies from all around the world. With the theme of “Enlightening the Future”, Hengtong took part in the exhibition with products and solutions such as AC charger, air-blowing micro cable, rail transit, industrial cable series, 5G indoor distributed connection solution, charging products system solution, FTTx solution, and so on.

With its complete communications industry chain and technological innovation achievements, Hengtong has attracted the attention from operators and customers from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, etc. In recent years, the infrastructure construction requirements are growing rapidly and the communications market is wide and fiercely-competing in the Middle East. The Middle East also leads the world in early 5G adoption (commercial) and 5G data usage.

In order to meet the 5G era, Hengtong has made a comprehensive layout of 5G industry basic communication products and applications. The 5G indoor distributed connection solution exhibited by Hengtong is aimed at improving indoor mobile communication environment. Compared with the traditional DAS (distributed antenna system), the new indoor distribution is evolutionary, upgradeable, and easy to be deployed. It has been installed and put into use in many venues.

In addition, under the general trend of global energy conservation and emission reduction, Hengtong takes advantage of the trend and enters the field of new energy vehicles to provide scientific solutions for people’s green travel. As one of the key components of new energy vehicles, the charging interface developed by Hengtong has passed the CQC certification and meets the IP 67 Waterproof standard. The new type of charging products system solutions has advantages such as high and low temperature resistance, long service life, waterproof performance and so on to provide a safe and stable technical support, and ensure connectivity between electric vehicles and charging facilities.

In the future, Hengtong will continue to promote technological innovation, increase the industrial layout of 5G, AI, smart city, energy interconnection and other emerging fields, and lead the industry to accelerate digital and intelligent transformation.

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DUBAI, UAE, Oct. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — At the Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF) 2021, Hank Chen, president of the Router Domain of Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, delivered a keynote speech during the Intelligent Cloud-Network session titled “Build Intelligent Cloud-Network, Enabling All-Service Growth.” He emphasized that Huawei’s Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution can help operators build future-oriented target networks, adapt to diversified service changes, unleash the potential of traditional services, seize new B2B opportunities, and ultimately enable all-service growth.

Consumer and vertical industry services are becoming more diversified. For individuals, the user experience is continuously improving, with short videos, social apps, live streaming, and AR/VR rising in popularity. For homes, they are expanding from places for entertainment to places for work and education, with the traffic volume and number of subscribers continuously growing. For enterprises, more and more services are becoming cloudified at an astonishing pace. All these diversified services bring huge opportunities to operators — B2C and B2H services are the cornerstone of an operator’s stable revenue, and the B2B service is the largest and most important opportunity.

Operators mainly face two waves of service development challenges: The first wave is that consumer services are shifting from connection-oriented to experience-oriented. This involves three specific challenges. First, the multi-service aggregation point— the central office — becomes a bottleneck due to a lack of space when downward DC movement to the edge gains popularity. Second, traffic and its directions are getting increasingly uncertain, but networks lack an intelligent scheduling capability, leading to low network utilization. Last, traditional IP networks work in shared and best-effort-forwarding modes, which are difficult to guarantee the user experience once congestion occurs. The second wave is that more enterprises need multi-cloud connection capabilities for their digital services. However, network and cloud capabilities do not match well. Challenges such as slow network service provisioning and lack of tenant-level assurance are present.

To address these challenges and fuel all-service growth, Chen believed that a future-oriented target IP network must have the following four characteristics:

• First, all services in one network. This network must be able to bear all B2C, B2H, B2B services.
• Second, network programmability. This network must be able to flexibly schedule route paths between clouds and networks based on SRv6 to optimize network utilization.
• Third, deterministic experience. This network must be able to provide tenant-level bandwidth and latency guarantee, replacing traditional best-effort forwarding.
• Last, agile cloud connection. This network must support flexible multi-cloud connection for fast service provisioning.

Huawei’s Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution is specially designed for operators to build such a future-oriented target IP network. This solution provides five key capabilities to enable operators’ all-service growth.

1. All-service super edge CO, enabling all-service bearing. Huawei’s compact super edge CO can bear diversified services, significantly reducing the TCO and improving the service experience. Specifically, Huawei’s super edge CO router adopts an all-in-one design. It integrates the BRAS, CGN, IPsec, and service router (SR) functions into one box-shaped device, saving 60% of space and reducing power consumption by 70%.
2. SRv6-based network programmability for flexible cloud-network scheduling: Huawei’s Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution supports flexible network path programming and service orchestration, and on-demand traffic scheduling, optimizing the utilization of the entire network. SRv6-based service chaining enables VASs to be flexibly orchestrated and subscribed to on demand. At present, SRv6 has been put into large-scale commercial use.
3. Elastic slicing for differentiated service assurance: Innovative technologies are used to make slices operable, productizable, and monetizable, helping operators increase revenue and optimize return on investment. According to Chen, Huawei made the following slicing innovations: NetEngine A800 series devices provide tenant-level slicing, enabling one line to be used for multiple purposes. Hierarchical slicing upgrades the original one-dimensional slicing to two dimensions, enabling fine-grained service assurance and doubling the monetization capability. Elastic slicing enables lossless dynamic capacity expansion and on-demand adjustment, without affecting services or wasting resources.
4. One-hop connection to multiple clouds for flexible multi-cloud connection and scheduling: The multi-cloud backbone network can pre-connect the resources of multiple cloud vendors. Enterprises only need to negotiate services with a single operator. Services can be quickly migrated to the cloud and flexibly scheduled based on SRv6, and service paths can be flexibly selected based on latency and bandwidth to ensure service experience. Huawei’s unique intelligent cloud-map algorithm enables operators to intelligently and evenly schedule multi-cloud resources, improving cloud resource utilization by 30%.
5. Network as a Service (NaaS) for an e-commerce-like service experience: The cloud-network integration architecture provides an e-commerce-like service experience. This involves three stages: At the pre-sales stage for service subscription, optimal cloud access position and latency-based path selection capabilities are provided. At the in-sales stage, services can be quickly provisioned with a visualized network-wide status. At the after-sales stage, tenant-level self-services are provided, enabling operators to query private line SLAs anytime anywhere. In addition, Huawei significantly simplifies the number of northbound interfaces from 1000 to 100, and reduces the integration time by 90% through modular interfaces. Services can be provisioned in minutes, bandwidth can be adjusted on demand, and orders, SLAs, and faults can be visualized from multiple dimensions.

To date, the key capabilities of the Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution have been deployed on more than 100 networks around the world, including both operators’ and vertical industries’, such as smart healthcare, smart education, smart government, and smart manufacturing. Huawei will continue to cooperate with operators and partners to accelerate the innovation and deployment of the Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution and promote the evolution of IP networks.

Chen believed that the Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution is the foundation for DICT transformation and can help operators achieve all-service growth. For B2C services, it will help build ultra-broadband, automated, and intelligent networks and promote long-term evolution. For B2H services, it will accelerate network monetization and increase the ARPU through experience assurance and refined operation. For B2B services, it will provide differentiated cloud-network capabilities to help operators boost digitalization development.

“IP On Everything will be the future,” said Chen. “IP connectivity will continue to extend, continuously bring intelligence and computing power to every person, every home, and every industry for a fully connected, intelligent world.”

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DUBAI, UAE, Oct. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the Intelligent Cloud-Network Session themed “Build Intelligent Cloud-Network, Accelerating New Growth” was successfully held in Dubai. As an important part of the 7th Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF 2021), this session saw leading operators and analysts of well-known institutions gather from all over the world to discuss topics relating to advanced network architecture and share successful business practices in the cloud-network era.

In the wake of pandemic, governments of many countries have accelerated their digitalization process. This is triggering great changes in the IP industry. Operators’ network construction has changed from connection-centric to cloud-centric. During the evolution from traditional IP networks to intelligent cloud-networks, what are the real requirements of enterprise and industry customers? Which innovative technologies can meet these requirements? What impact does the evolution of the network architecture have on operators’ infrastructure and operation mode? These were the focal points discussed at this session.

Dan Bieler, analyst from Forrester, kicked things off by proposing that emerging technologies drive user requirements to change. In his view, enterprise digitalization introduces requirements for service cloudification, requiring operators to build intelligent networks that feature cloud-network convergence to transform from ICT to DICT.

Hank Chen, President of Huawei’s Router Domain, then gave a speech themed “Building Intelligent Cloud-network, Enabling All-Service Growth”. In his speech, he mentioned that consumer and vertical industry services are becoming more diversified, and that user experience upgrade and vertical industry upgrade present great opportunities to operators. Operators need to build an all-in-one IP network that supports network programming, tenant-level SLA assurance, and agile cloudification to meet the growth requirements of all individual, home, and enterprise services, and ultimately lay a foundation for operators’ DICT transformation.

Fiber@Home is the largest Internet service provider in Bangladesh, and focuses on how to deliver secure, robust, and faster fiber networks across the country. Sumon Ahmed Sabir, CTO of Fiber@Home, explained how their business success comes from quickly seizing business opportunities. As such, their target network architecture must be agile and flexible to respond to new business demands. In addition, Fiber@Home actively introduces innovative technologies such as SRv6 path programming, FlexE hard slicing, and service visualization to develop new business models and thus succeed in the market.

In Hong Kong, CMHK is undergoing a transformation from providing only mobile services to providing diversified services such as home broadband and enterprise private lines. Lindel Sun, Director of the Business Development Department, believed that network slicing technology enables differentiated service bearing on the live network and meets varying requirements of different services, laying a solid foundation for the strategic transformation of CMHK.

Francois Olivier, chief engineering of Rain, the first 5G service provider in South Africa, said that massive connections, rapid bandwidth growth, and high SLA reliability are the main characteristics of 5G service development. The primary goal of Rain network development is to build a converged bearer network that features ultra-large capacity, SRv6-based simplified architecture, slicing, and automated O&M. In this way, the digitalization process of numerous industries can be accelerated.

UBBF is the world’s highest-level fixed network summit, jointly organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Huawei. This Intelligent Cloud-Network Session, aiming to help global operators explore new markets, exhibits operators’ cloud-oriented network architectures and Huawei’s differentiated capabilities of Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution.

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Smile Identity is providing the Identity Verification, Digital KYC, User Onboarding, Document Verification, Liveness Checks, Face Verification, Anti-fraud, and Identity Data Deduplication tools powering the rapid growth and expansion of businesses and startups across Africa.

LAGOS, Nigeria, Oct. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Smile Identity, the leading provider of ID verification, document verification, and digital KYC compliance solutions in Africa, announced today the addition of Uganda to our list of covered countries!

This brings us – and our customers – one step closer to our goal of enabling comprehensive digital KYC and ID verification coverage for the entire African continent with only one simple integration to Smile Identity.

This addition also brings the total number of unique identities covered by Smile Identity across Africa to over 300 million. Smile Identity has the widest reach, and most comprehensive coverage of unique identities across Africa; more than any other KYC and Identity Verification provider on the continent.

Irshad Muttur , Aspira’s Chief Operations Officer, says “Smile Identity enables us to onboard customers more securely, mitigating fraud risks and allowing for a more confident business growth.”

Starting immediately, all verified Smile Identity Partners will be able to onboard users in Uganda using the Uganda National ID. There are 17 million unique identities in the NIRA Uganda database. For Smile ID partners, this means 17 million potential customers who can be onboarded in only a matter of seconds.

“Your existing Smile Identity integration means you already support Uganda. All you need to do is specify it in the ID type field,” says Cameron Gray, VP of Product and Engineering.

As we like to say at Smile ID, you now have 17 million new reasons to Smile!

About Smile Identity

Smile Identity is the leading Know Your Customer (KYC) and Identity Verification provider for Africa. We help companies scale rapidly across Africa by confirming the true identity of their users in real time, using any smartphone or computer. Our technology is powered by proprietary Machine Learning algorithms designed specifically for African faces, and our products include Identity Verification, Enhanced Digital KYC, User Onboarding, Document Verification, Liveness Checks, Face Verification, Anti-fraud Checks, and Identity Data Deduplication.

To standardize identity verification across the continent and provide a single solution for a new generation of African companies, Smile Identity works with local ID authorities and has built a platform that combines ID validation with proprietary face verification and liveness checks to support non-surveillance, consent-based access and financial inclusion. The company performs over 1 million identity checks every month across Africa and its software is used in banking, fintech, ride sharing, worker verification, public social welfare programs, and telecommunications.  Its customers include payments companies like Paystack, Paga and Chippercash; neo-banks like Kudabank and Umba; traditional banks like Stanbic IBTC and Sterling Bank; cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Luno, and Paxful; and even supply-chain businesses like Twiga.

With subsidiaries, branch offices and engineers in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda and counting, Smile Identity’s growing team is made up of people from 12 countries, including 8 African nations.

Backed by Costanoa, CRE Venture Capital, Khosla Impact, LocalGlobe and a host of Angel Investors from across Africa, Smile Identity is enabling the growth of tech ecosystems across the African continent while providing infrastructure to build trust online. For more information, please visit www.smileidentity.com.

Press Contact:
Ashiwel Ochui
press@smileidentity.com

Related Links:
https://smileidentity.com
smileidentity.com/contact-us/press
https://cdn.smileidentity.com/Smile-Identity-Media-Kit.zip

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