Telecom Egypt has tapped the expertise of IBM to help the operator augment the core technology infrastructure supporting its mobile, fixed, and core networks.
With revenues of EGP 44.3 billion (financial year 2022), Telecom Egypt is Egypt’s largest telecom group and one of the country’s larger enterprises. The state-owned company launched over 150 years ago with the first telegraph line in Egypt, and today operates as a full-service telecom operator.
To better meet demand from its growing subscriber base, as well as their rapidly mounting requirements for high-speed broadband and mobile connectivity, Telecom Egypt is investing heavily in its network capacity and operations.
Working together with IBM, Telecom Egypt is enhancing its so-called operations support systems. These systems comprise a collection of hardware and software tools that help telecom groups manage their telecom networks.
Also known as telecommunication network management systems, such systems assist operators with the design, build, operate and maintenance of their communications networks. They also enable telecom groups to monitor key metrics such as network availability, operating capacity and service quality.
“We are always keen on investing in developing and modernizing our networks to ensure that our customers receive the best communication and information technology services,” said Adel Hamed, Managing Director and CEO of Telecom Egypt.
On the collaboration with IBM, he said: “We are happy to work with IBM as our technology partner to improve our networks' operational efficiency, leverage automation capabilities and reduce the time required to monitor and repair incidents, thus improving the quality of services provided to our customers.”
Led by its team in Egypt, IBM’s engineers and technologists will implement a number of automation tools and cloud solutions that will provide Telecom Egypt with “fast and flexible business operations” that will “reduce operational cost”, and “provide better visibility into performance data and dependencies across their environments” that will “minimize the time required to resolve network related incidents”, said Marwa Abbas, General Manager at IBM in Egypt.
“The new solution will allow Telecom Egypt to identify, analyze, address and resolve complex IT issues in dynamic and complex environments,” she added.
For those interested in the tech details: Telecom Egypt will adopt IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps deployed on RedHat OpenShift and implement IBM’s suite of robotic process automation solutions.
Shedding light on one example of tech-driven improvement potential, if Telecom Egypt today wants to track the network’s operating capacity and service quality across the country, it follows a manual process of sending power signals across central offices and cabins to identify ‘weak points’, which could require at least 18 hours of compiling and revising data. In the post-tech-implementation era, this process could be brought down to just a few hours.
Last month, Telecom Egypt signed a cooperation agreement with China’s Huawei, focused on digital transformation and technology work.