Orange Group and its Senegalese subsidiary Sonatel have opened Africa’s first facility for testing and developing fifth-generation telecoms equipment, applications and services. The Orange 5G Lab Dakar, in the capital city of the rapidly developing West African Republic of Senegal, will distil the experiences of the existing network of 13 Orange 5G Labs in Europe, and take an African interpretation of them for the local domestic markets. The new site is housed at the Orange Digital Centre in the Senegalese capital and its rationale is to help local companies discover more about the technology.
Fintec futures
There will be consultants from Orange and government-funded officials on hand to help creative systems integrators and start ups to develop use cases, test new products and pilot new services on an experimental 5G network. Dakar is the nation’s financial centre and a hub for shipping and transport in the region. The main national industries include food processing, mining, cement, artificial fertiliser, chemicals, textiles, petrol refining and agriculture, which ahas taken on increasing importance.
Nokia speed record
Orange has pioneered IT, cloud services and comms in the former French colony. Orange Senegal staged the country’s first 5G test in Dakar in November 2020 in partnership with Chinese hardware vendor Huawei. A second test, this time in collaboration with Nokia achieved data speeds of up to 2Gbps. The experiment was conducted in the commune of Saly in the Thies region in December 2021.
Satellite gateway
Orange Senegal and Sonatel are working with satellite provider SES to create the first African gateway for the O3b mPOWER constellation. The gateway is located at the Sonatel teleport in the Senegalese territory of Gandoul. The installation means that low-latency and cloud-optimised connectivity services can be delivered to Africa. In 2020 Orange became the first telco to adopt O3b mPOWER, with plans to start service from the constellation in the Central African Republic. The Sonatel teleport was the site of Africa’s first 30-meter satellite dish. Orange, Sonatel and SES also plan to establish a memorial on site at the Gandoul gateway to highlight the history of satellite connectivity in Africa.
Orange mission
SES will use the gateway to support telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) functions for the O3b mPOWER fleet. The gateway lets Sonatel and Orange boost bandwidth via O3b mPOWER to remote and underserved regions. “Orange’s mission to build intelligent, open networks in order to foster usages and access to digital technologies for the greatest number of people,” said Jean-Luc Vuillemin, the EVP of Orange International Networks.
Source: https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/orange-opens-africas-first-5g-lab/