ATF 2024: Ericsson's Todd Ashton on 4G & 5G growth in Africa

Ericsson Middle East and Africa VP and Head of the Customer Unit for South and East Africa, Todd Ashton, spoke to Connecting Africa Editor, Paula Gilbert, at Africa Tech Festival 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa, about the growth of 4G and 5G in Africa.

He spoke about how 4G connectivity continues to expand across the continent and why the technology is still so crucial for Africa.

He shared how low-cost 4G devices are making access possible for more Africans and how growing smartphone adoption is helping to ramp up financial inclusion by powering better fintech solutions.

Ashton discussed some of the use cases for enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), fixed wireless access (FWA) and other opportunities for 4G and 5G in sectors like mining.

He said that despite the high price of 5G devices he still predicts a decent increase in 5G networks in Africa going forward especially for operators looking to roll out FWA services on 5G for the enterprise or home broadband market.

"I think we will see steady growth of 5G, meanwhile we will continue to see a steady decline of 3G and eventually I think we might start seeing more 3G spectrum being used either for 5G or for 4G, 2G I expect to stay for a while because we need a USSD channel for mobile money," he said.

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He shared some insights on the rise of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite services, the growth of open RAN and cloud RAN solutions in Africa, and how the telecoms sector is using artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce operating costs.