As enterprises and service providers navigate the complexities of modern connectivity, MEF is accelerating the adoption of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). Artificial intelligence’s (AI) integration with NaaS is advancing this shift, enabling service providers to drive new business in meeting the emerging demands of enterprise.

Read more: MEF’s Kevin Vachon on Accelerating NaaS Adoption and Industry Certifications

As we step into 2025, the telecom landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa presents both significant opportunities and challenges. In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review, Rajiv Aggarwal, Head of Sales, Sub-Saharan Africa, Cloud & Network Services at Nokia, reflects on key takeaways from 2024, the growing role of automation and AI, the escalating importance of security, and the trends set to shape the telecom industry in 2025. His insights offer a roadmap for navigating this rapidly evolving market.

Read more: Shaping Sub-Saharan Africa’s Telecom Future: Insights from Nokia’s Rajiv Aggarwal

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is at the forefront of innovation and global digital transformation, delivering next-generation digital services to enterprises and consumers. du, one of the country’s leading telecom and digital service providers, has demonstrated its commitment to advancing the 5G Advanced innovation and UAE’s digital landscape.

Read more: Saleem Alblooshi Explores How du is Developing the UAE’s 5G Advanced and Sustainable Future

Telecom Vendor
Typography

Nokia announced a major addition to its monetization portfolio that helps service providers improve the digital customer experience, implement innovative business models and unlock new revenue opportunities.

Today, communications service providers' customers expect compelling, real-time digital experiences. However, legacy revenue management systems hinder their ability to build digital businesses, and efforts to update these systems are often costly, time consuming and prone to failure.

Nokia's monetization portfolio provides a modern approach. It features Nokia's new Smart Plan Suite, a truly cloud-native, 5G-ready offering, providing integrated real-time charging, policy control and customer engagement capabilities. Using continuous delivery principles and DevOps automation, Nokia Smart Plan Suite software is updated regularly so that service providers always have access to the latest and most advanced capabilities.

"In order to build thriving digital businesses our customers must modernize their business and operations platforms. Our portfolio allows them to engage with subscribers in 'digital time'," said Bhaskar Gorti, president of Applications & Analytics at Nokia, said. "This means delivering the right service through the right channel the moment they need it. We do this by providing 'connected intelligence' -- we connect insights, people, processes and technologies to help service providers monetize their services, push the limits of automation and delight their customers."

Nokia's monetization portfolio, inclusive of Smart Plan Suite, empowers service providers to deliver highly personalized and contextualized offers at the ideal moment, enabling them to enrich and monetize subscribers' digital experiences. Nokia Smart Plan Suite is complemented by Nokia's mediation, digital sales channel, real-time decision-making and machine learning-powered analytics software.

These technologies provide more precise subscriber information to enable automated, real-time engagements. As a result, the solution can increase subscriber take-up rates of campaigns by more than 400 percent.

The monetization solution simplifies customer engagement through a variety of self-service and care channels powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, and using assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and others.

Nokia Smart Plan Suite software links service providers with partner ecosystems to support smart ads, sponsored data, content and over-the-top providers, enabling the creation of new use cases. By integrating with webscale offerings, such as Google's Mobile Data Plan Sharing API, it can deliver a better experience for mobile subscribers by providing innovative in-application offerings.

John Abraham, senior analyst at Analysys Mason, said: "Service providers need a new approach if they are to deliver the personalized, contextualized and immediate experiences consumers have become accustomed to from leading webscale companies. Most revenue management systems in use within telcos today are monolithic in nature and weren't designed to support such modern experiences. The industry needs to adopt a different approach, and solutions based on a cloud-native architecture such as Nokia's Smart Plan Suite are key to helping CSPs cross the chasm in enabling a new class of innovative and engaging customer experiences."

Pin It