AI has become a key priority for enterprises in South Africa, offering myriad opportunities to work faster and smarter. However, many organisations have concerns around data sovereignty, security, compliance and how latency will affect the performance of AI applications. AI at the edge, with licensed private networks, offer the solution for the future of AI-enabled business.
This is according to Gary Woolley, Chief Commercial Officer at Comsol, which positions itself as South Africa’s leading business-only fixed wireless access provider.
AI at the edge – where AI applications reside on devices themselves or on localised, satellite data centres – is emerging as a solution to the latency and compliance challenges, Woolley says.
The network infrastructure itself is critical to deliver on the promise of AI, he notes. It must guarantee low latency, high throughput and reliability. Woolley says licensed, private networks address data security and latency concerns. Operators with licensed spectrum are better positioned than other connectivity providers to offer the bandwidth, performance and security necessary for AI use cases, he says.
Woolley says: “Licensed spectrum offers full control of the environment. To use the analogy of the network as the N1 highway, with unlicensed spectrum you’re subject to contention – or traffic. So when you get on the highway in peak hour, you have no control over how fast you’ll be able to travel. With licensed spectrum, you own the highway. You can allocate certain lanes for particular types of traffic. You might prioritise one lane just for real-time AI decision-making, and another for all other traffic. In a connectivity layer, control and SLAs are crucial, particularly with demanding AI applications. With licensed spectrum, we can start shaping the bandwidth and quality of service, and guarantee it.”
Spectrum allocations play an important role in the licensed service that can be offered, Comsol notes. As South Africa’s only mmWave 28GHz MEF 2.0 compliant wireless national wholesale open access network (WOAN), Comsol owns the largest tranche of contiguous 28GHz spectrum in South Africa and has moved to take the lead in the local 5G private networks space, with 60MHz of the 3.7GHz spectrum.
Comsol’s networks not only support AI in end-user environments, they also harness AI to improve quality of service. Woolley says: “We have AI in our own telecommunications network, for predictive maintenance and to avoid bottlenecks. We use AI to analyse traffic patterns and user behaviour in real-time.”
Woolley says guaranteed performance will become increasingly important, where AI is deployed in mining and industrial settings, and for mission-critical enterprise use cases.
“Many of the AI use cases emerging in local enterprises are in industrial OT environments – for example, reducing harm in a mining environment. So end-users must have complete control and confidence in their networks,” he says. “On top of lives being on the line, industrial sites and mines will also depend more and more on AI to support things like predictive maintenance and avoiding over-maintenance on heavy machinery. AI helps them build data on trends and alerts to optimise their environments, reduce risk and cost, and improve profitability.”
Share