Nokia announced that its 4G and 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network slicing with mobile operator Safaricom on its live commercial network was a success. This is the first-time 4G/5G network slicing has been successfully achieved in Africa.

Mikko Lavanti, Head of Mobile Networks, Nokia MEA, said, “Globally, the pace of 5G network rollouts has surpassed 4G/LTE networks. Two years after the first LTE launch there were only 25 million subscriptions across 60 networks, while two years after the first 5G launch, 340 million subscriptions were registered across 155 networks. This trend in the region clearly indicates that there is a pressing need and expansion of 5G networks

The 5G Edge-in-a-Box solution is expected to be a game changer for telecom companies, allowing them to rapidly deploy 5G communications to support demand for new use cases.

The rise of the Internet of Things has led to an explosion in machine accounts. And the Arab Gulf’s pioneering adoption of 5G suggests that IoT use cases will soon increase in number. This leads regional organizations into a new hornet’s nest of identity problems. The accounts for things like services and application pools are not identities.

Nearly all (92%) of the 250 enterprise organizations surveyed in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) expressed high levels of concern about all aspects of enterprise digital resilience.