Stc Kuwait first to launch E2E 5G SA network in MENA

Offers ARM based core and convergent billing

KUWAIT CITY, Feb 15: Kuwait Telecommunications Company-stc – Kuwait, a world-class digital leader providing innovative services and platforms to customers enabling the digital transformation in Kuwait, announced today the deployment of an E2E 5G SA solution from Devices to Network and billing with the ability to simultaneously support both 5G Non-Stand Alone (NSA) and 5G Stand Alone (SA).

This initiative builds on stc’s partnership and vision to collaborate with Huawei to deliver an agile, cloud native, next generation 5G network that gives stc the ability to introduce new 5G services and experiences with the shortest time to market. With the best 5G wireless coverage by end of 2019, stc – Kuwait updated its wireless network seamlessly to support the SA and NSA terminals. stc – Kuwait’s 5G core network platform is fully designed with containerized and micro service architecture making it truly Cloud Native. The hardware of platform is MENA first running on the innovative and disruptive next generation ARM V8 architecture powered by Huawei servers which have been specifically designed to meet the needs of the ICT industry especifically as we enter the 5G era.

These ARM based servers are able to leverage their abilities in providing a highly scalable, massively dense, power efficient 5G Core to stc – Kuwait based on the industry

Maziad Alharbi

standard 5G reference architecture ensuring an open and rich ecosystem.

stc – Kuwait also upgraded its billing system to further support multidimensional, multi-scenario charging for consumer, home and corporates. Collaborating with 5G SA technology, stc currently has an end to end network ready with an initial focus on eMBB and is looking forward to the industry to standardize mMTC and uRLLC.

stc – Kuwait CEO, engineer Maziad Alharbi said, “5G is where the aspiration of the enterprising business and the magical consumer use cases will for the first time become reality. We are able to provide guaranteed SLAs through SA, especially the enhancement in uplink to support our ‘Dedicated Access’ offering to enterprises. It is now possible with 5G to see stc pave the way for users to experience low latency and massive connections to become a reality in Kuwait.”

He added, “This is why stc has partnered with Huawei to design and deliver a network that considers the latest trends and utilizes evolutionary learning systems to provide an unmatched user experience.”