The mobile technology scene has witnessed great developments in the last couple of years and the Egyptian telecommunication market has steadily grown with mobile broadband traffic doubling every two years.
To find out about the industry’s latest news, and Etisalat Misr’s latest plans, Daily News Egypt interviewed the company’s Chief Technology Officer Khalid Murshed.
What is your perspective about the mobile broadband?
In the past few years, we have seen mobile broadband traffic doubling every two years. We expect that this trend will continue for the coming few years. We are very proud that the Egyptian market is hungry for mobile broadband and the Egyptian user is striving for the best service. Etisalat Misr is always aiming to provide the best in class network to cater for the customer expectations. We aimed to be ahead of the curve, and that was what drove us to adopt new technological features and collaborate with the world leading suppliers aiming to guarantee the highest customer satisfaction.
You mentioned your partners as world leading, we would like to know more about Etisalat suppliers and who are they? And your plans after launching 5G?
Etisalat has a wide portfolio of partners and suppliers that include the market leaders as Huawei, Ericson, Nokia, ZTE, Cisco, and others. Etisalat counts on its partners to deliver the state of art technologies. We are known to be a technology leading company in providing business solutions and satisfying customer needs. We provide new innovative tailored solutions for different categories and age groups.
In Egypt, what are the upcoming challenges that we will witness with the existence of new technologies?
Needless to say that we are always working on overcoming all challenges that we face in Egypt such as:
Scarcity of resources in terms of spectrum in Egypt. To clarify, the four operators in Egypt have the spectrum resource of one operator in neighbor countries. This is imposing several challenges while the customers are looking for a distinguished experience.
In addition, to stay ahead of the technology, sites need periodic maintenance. Infrastructure versatility is necessary to address the Egyptian market.
We are always adopting advanced technology in order to resolve business challenges; this is the culture and DNA of Etisalat. We transform every challenge to an opportunity. We were the first operator to announce an advanced solution from Huawei, “Cloud-AIR”, in which we will not need to allocate spectrum to a specific technology. We always come up with solutions to overcome market challenges. Our agility makes a difference.
Based on your expectations from MWC and Huawei booth visit, how do you see Huawei providing a better value to your business in different areas such as 5G, cloud, data centers, future solutions for business clients?
Huawei and Etisalat have been collaborating for many years. Huawei is a reliable partner in providing cutting-edge technologies and a leading supplier to the whole industry because they are always pushing the envelope. They are always challenging the status quo and moving the bar higher than expected. We see new technology from Huawei every quarter and that is in line with our vision, which is providing the state of art technology and best solutions to our customers.
