Nokia’s Head of Enterprise in Latin America, Marcelo Entreconti, discusses the company’s work with Telefónica, deploying industrial grade private broadband network solutions in that part of the world,

Can you go into more detail about the nature of the partnership. What will Telefonica be providing and what will Nokia be providing?

Telefónica and Nokia have been partners in the deployment and evolution of communications networks, both in fixed and mobile, since the mid-90s. With the evolution of technology and the evolving role of communications in the market and in enhancing economic development, our partnership has grown and spread into the enterprise segments where there’s a growing need for efficiency and digitalisation.

Telefónica has a historic presence across an array of markets within the Enterprise space and Nokia provides world leading industrial-grade private wireless network solutions to enable and expand Telefónica’s services offering.

Why is the partnership important? What’s unique about it, both in Latin America and the rest of the world?

To be able to offer customised and competitive private wireless network solutions that truly address each enterprise’s needs, we need to develop an integrated end-to-end approach that brings together technology, business understanding, global knowledge, and local reach. With our partnership with Telefónica Hispam we bring a combination of those factors for most markets in Latin America, providing good connectivity, enabling greater optimisation of operations, achieving important productivity and efficiency rates, and contributing to the digitalisation of most industrial sectors throughout Latin America.

Why is Latin America an important market? Are there any countries being focussed on, and why?

Latin America is growing fast due to the increasing need for digitalisation, productivity, efficiency and safety. The recent focus on geopolitics and health are increasing the need to further develop and accelerate production to enable self-supply of raw materials, minerals and agricultural products which are key strategic resources and income sources in Latin America.

This partnership covers all countries where Telefónica Hispam is present, however we have a special focus in Chile, Perú and Colombia where we have already established a very solid program which will help us to speed up the partnership implementation in other countries.

What work still needs to be done to convince the business/user community of the Industry 4.0 use case?

Evangelising and educating the business communities about the strong benefits of digitalising their operations is key and demands a very large reach and competence, which we will increase with this partnership. We also need to develop new use cases to further take advantage of existing technologies, leveraging the existing experiences across countries and sectors, and providing tools to the enterprise communities to understand and build business cases to take their companies to the next level.

Can you give examples of businesses working with Telefonica and Nokia in relation to this?

We have already successfully deployed with Telefónica our industrial-grade private wireless network solutions in sectors like mining in Perú with companies including Minera Las Bambas and Antamina. We have also deployed within the Manufacturing sector with Associated British Foods (British Sugar).