Africa’s industrial and mining sectors continue to benefit as Nokia and Sedna Industrial IT Solutions ramp up their 2022 LTE private wireless partnership which includes the deployment of the leading-edge Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) to expand further into southern Africa.

“We are progressing significantly beyond last year’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and are accelerating activities, with an upcoming roadshow set for southern Africa where we will showcase the benefits of network and safety advances for African mining and industrial companies,” says Anton Fester, MD of Johannesburg-based Sedna Industrial IT Solutions.

In November of last year Sedna strengthened its partnership with Nokia to become its main value-added reseller (VAR) and systems integrator for Africa in the mining sector among others to enable  Industry 4.0  applications. This comes as demand for enhanced network solutions grows in Africa thanks to their ability to deliver safe, more efficient, and productive solutions in operational areas above and underground. 

Gary Conway, Nokia Head of Energy and Mining business for Africa, India, Middle East and China said, “We are excited to strengthen our partnership with Sedna and are extremely encouraged by the potential in Africa, with demand on the rise for mission-critical solutions, whether fixed and wireless multiservice solutions, 4.9G/LTE, 5G private wireless or secure public networks in remote locations.” 

Nokia and Sedna are seeing growth across energy – oil, gas, power – high-end mission-critical infrastructure in manufacturing, ports, maritime, airports, railways, and across the public sectors.

Africa is a key market for both companies and a strong area for growth. Productivity increases in some cases have been greater than 20% based on deployments and experience in Asia, US, and Europe.  According to a recent case study, a transition to LTE has reduced communication errors by 85%, resulting in a production increase of 255,000 tonnes a year.  

These solutions enhance efficiencies and sustainability, while ensuring enhanced safety.

Digital automation in mines has many benefits, ranging from improved worker safety, operational improvements and significantly improved ‘green’ outcomes. A Nokia case study shows that the digital automation of a mining truck fleet using a private wireless network led to a 10% reduction in fuel consumption and 15,000 tonnes in Co2 emissions (based on an average mine site with an annual production of 150m tonnes).

According to Anton Fester, these solutions and networks are “very suitable” for Africa. 

“You can really look after your assets, protect jobs and workers, ensure your mining enterprise stays out of repair shops, gets much better asset usage and mileage – the benefits are endless. This applies across mining but also increasingly into the manufacturing and energy spaces,” he says.

“For instance, legacy systems perform several functions across multiple networks, using different infrastructure. We pick up the legacy interface and combine it on a single infrastructure to provide an end-to-end management view of distribution and production.”

Gary Conway said, “LTE private wireless is proving extremely beneficial in the energy sector to improve efficiencies, reduce downtime and faults (80% of Asian utilities are already on this journey with Nokia). This level of automation does not replace jobs but leads to increases in productivity and more opportunities.”

He added: “This is a glass-half-full story in Africa if you consider the demand for more scalable solutions like these, which we are already experiencing. The pioneering use cases have been initiated and it is now about enabling this technology more broadly.” 

Southern African industries will remain competitive and I predict that this drive for technology and investment will continue in Africa” concludes Fester.

Nokia has deployed mission-critical networks to more than 2,600 leading enterprise customers in the transportation, energy, large enterprise, manufacturing, webscale and public sector segments around the globe. We have also extended our expertise to more than 595 private wireless customers worldwide and have been cited as the leading provider of private industrial grade wireless networking worldwide by numerous industry analysts.