Page 7 - SAMENA Trends - October 2021

SAMENA COUNCIL ACTIVITY SAMENA TRENDS

network infrastructure and leveraging the power of Fiber and
IPv6, unlocking new capital, exploring new ways of sharing
responsibilities to develop that infrastructure, developing human
capital for the digital age, creating awareness and relevance to
proliferate meaningful digital services, and ensuring everyone
can afford broadband connectivity and quality-of-service. The
Council also correlated the aims of the UBBF with the objectives
of the Broadband Commission’s Agenda for Action, and also
highlighted the recently released four strategic recommendations
of the Broadband Commission's Working Group on 21st Century
Funding and Financing Models to address ICT infrastructure gaps,
including gaps in fiber deployment. The UBBF was followed by
SAMENA Council's SAMENA Accelerator – UBBF policy discussion
forum, organized in collaboration with Huawei, to deep dive into
issues ranging from processes, lack of enabling environment,
lack of investment incentives, and other business and operational
difficulties, which continue to impede deployment of fiber networks
and migration from IPv4 to IPv6. Adding to the multi-country
perspectives by the ITU and from Europe, Africa, South Asia
and the Middle East, achievements shared by TDRA (UAE), CITC
(Saudi Arabia), PTA (Pakistan), NTRA (Egypt), and experience-
sharing from Africa’s developing economies, including Senegal
and Botswana, Bocar BA, CEO - SAMENA Council, in his message,
encouraged the rectification of "Right-of-Way issues, Fiber
deployment methodology selection, collaboration among Fiber
players, and the need for governments to champion deployment of
Fiber with full understanding of the Business, Social, Market, and
National needs." The discussion on fiber deployment underpinned

7 OCTOBER 2021