BARCELONA: Veon’s chief executive said on Wednesday that the company plans to focus on 4G deployment for the next three years before moving on to 5G, a strategy that contrasts sharply with the bleeding-edge ambitions of other telecom operators gathered at the Mobile World Congress. The vast majority of operators speaking at the annual industry event in Barcelona bragged about their plans to roll out 5G networks, with Orange, Verizon, and Deutsche Telekom showcasing their latest robotics and edge computing experiments.
In the face of its largely low-income, infrastructure-starved customer base, the majority of whom earn daily wages, Veon, which serves 240 million users in countries as diverse as Pakistan, Algeria, and Russia, insisted on taking a very different path.
On the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress, CEO Kaan Terzioglu told Reuters, “There is a real need to make sure that smartphone penetration gets to the right levels faster, that 4G accessibility gets to the right levels.”
“I’m not a fan of the vanity of 5G being discussed before we finish the basics.”
The mobile and broadband operator, whose largest shareholder is Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s investment vehicle LetterOne, will work to provide broadband access to its customers, with Terzioglu indicating that he would be willing to collaborate with Elon Musk’s Starlink to bring internet access to remote areas via satellite.
“I don’t expect commercial 5G deployments in our markets in the next three years… though we will deploy fixed wireless access and private networks,” Terzioglu said, adding that only about half of his customers had 4G coverage.
The pandemic, which exacerbated socio-economic inequality as a result of the abrupt shift online – something half of the world is unable to do – has increased extreme poverty by 7%, according to Terzioglu, who joined other telecommunications executives in vowing to combat the digital divide.
“The only way to address this is to ensure that everyone has equal access to 4G and fiber in their homes; otherwise, the gap will widen even further.”
(Kirsten Donovan edited Clara-Laeila Laudette’s and Supantha Mukherjee’s reporting.)/nRead More