Connectivity sits at the centre of how South Africans work, build businesses and entertain themselves, and the opportunities riding on it grow with every new user. Telkom’s mobile base passed 25 million subscribers this year, and serving them well is as much an engineering ambition as a commercial one.
“Customers are demanding reliability, affordability and quality connectivity," says Hercules Ragoleka, executive of RAN engineering, build and optimisation at Telkom. "On the other side, operators are experiencing increasing costs while continuously investing in new technology and maintaining legacy."
In the South African context, cable theft and outages add to that load. “Our operating environment requires us to be resilient and have tenacity,” he adds.
Predicting the fault
Telkom has been simplifying its network architecture by reducing layers and standardising platforms, which Ragoleka describes as a way to do more with less. Cost is only part of the return – a simpler estate is easier to instrument, and that instrumentation makes prediction workable.
“Smarter networks are intelligent and adaptive networks where we’re able to predict events before they happen,” he explains. Machine learning now supports predictive forecasting, self-healing and traffic optimisation, and has been extended into dynamic network planning so that coverage decisions can be made faster.
“We need to predict incidents in the network so that we’re able to respond before customers experience them,” he says. “By the time they become prolonged, we already have our engineers in the field addressing the problem.”
Beyond ESG
Availability depends as much on power as it does on intelligence, and Telkom’s spend reflects that. Solar, batteries, intelligent power management and cooling are deployed across Telkom's network sites, alongside power bought as a service from tower companies moving into the space.
“Energy is a real cost and risk on networks,” says Ragoleka. Greener networks bring that cost down, and Telkom is targeting carbon neutrality by 2035 and net zero by 2040. “It’s about reliability, service delivery, cost optimisation, customer experience and business continuity,” he explains.
Cable theft has forced the same thinking into Telkom’s traffic routing, where diverse routes and what Ragoleka calls "adaptability in assurance" keep services running during a break incident.
Cost and inclusion
Every base station carries a running cost that the traffic it serves must justify, which is why coverage in rural areas has always been a harder commercial case to make than coverage in a city.
“Smarter and greener networks reduce operating costs, which allows us to focus investment on underserved and rural areas so that we can broaden digital inclusion,” says Ragoleka.
Power solves a particular problem in those markets, where there is less existing infrastructure and a site cannot depend on a grid connection that may not be there. With continued 4G and 5G expansion, AI applied to capacity management and further investment in resilient power, the next 12 to 24 months are as much about quality as they are about reach.
“We would love to be that backbone that contributes to prosperity within the South African economy,” he concludes.
View the full video here.
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