Innovation in Africa got a boost on two fronts. Earlier this year, Orange Money Botswana and EcoCash launched a new partnership to enable better and more affordable access to digital money transfers between Zimbabwe and Botswana. The service, powered by TransferTo’s global mobile payments network, is now available. It allows Zimbabwean diaspora living in Botswana to use Orange Money digital wallets to send money back home to family and friends, in real-time, directly into an EcoCash mobile wallet. In other news from Africa, Vodafone and Sanku’s Project Healthy Children have teamed up to equip small flour mills across Africa with Internet of Things (IoT) services. The upgrade will help Sanku provide nutritious, fortified flour to millions of people.

Tata Communications has announced its collaboration with Hong Kong-based startup Doki Technologies on the recently unveiled dokiWatch S for children. Each smartwatch will come with a Tata Communications MOVE SIM built in. When a parent or child switches on the smartwatch for the first time, the device will be instantly connected to the Internet, anywhere in the world. Tata’s partnership will support Doki’s expansion into the US and Canada, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Stateside, Air Force technology received a lift this month with the announcement of a five-year deal with AT&T. AT&T will work closely with Air Force Academy trainers and technologists to help them become facile with a variety of modern and forthcoming technologies, including 5G, Smart Base solutions (think Smart Cities applied to a military base), Internet of Things, and cybersecurity. 

IoT News

This month, new data from Juniper Research shone a light onto the ever-expanding Internet of Things (IoT) landscape. New data predicts that the total number of connected IoT sensors and devices is set to exceed 50 billion by 2022—in just four years’ time—up from a current estimated 21 billion. That’s a rate of expansion that’s more than double.

Recognizing the rapid pace of predicted IoT expansion, AT&T and Nokia are teaming up to provide virtually seamless IoT connectivity globally. Nokia’s Worldwide IoT Network Grid (WING) will offer AT&T’s enterprise customers the benefits of Nokia’s global IoT ecosystem, opening new use cases and expanded capabilities to a wide range of industries and applications, including transportation, health, manufacturing, retail, agriculture, utilities, consumer electronics and smart cities. WING’s capabilities are expected to be available in more than 20 countries around the world by early 2020.

Juniper Networks launched a new generation of its routing platform this month for IoT and 5G. Its MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform, along with several software innovations, will provide requisite programmability, performance and flexibility for rapid service deployment in the cloud economy. The platform is the industry’s only solution that delivers near-infinite programmability, cost efficiency and versatility with performance at scale.

Network News

The latest edition of Ericsson’s Mobility Report, released earlier this month, highlights the acceleration of network innovation. The report predicts 3.5 billion IoT cellular connections by 2023 as well as 5G commercial launches for later in 2018. North America is seen leading the charge on 5G—and the report predicts that 20 percent of global mobile data traffic will be on 5G networks in 2023. In other industry research, Point Topic has released a report that examines the current and future mix of access technologies in the broadband network. Fiber and cable technologies now dominate the global broadband market, with the technologies accounting for nearly 80 percent of all fixed subscriptions (including 2017). More than 50 percent of people in more than 40 countries, including Singapore (97 percent), China (89 percent), United States (87 percent), and the UK (55 percent), are connected via full-fiber, fiber-fed copper or cable.

Nokia was featured in a variety of updates and announcements this month. The company announced that Frontier Communications Corporation, an integrated, US-based communications provider delivering voice, data, high-speed Internet and video services will deploy Nokia’s XGS-PON technology to deliver faster broadband speeds to business and residential customers.