Business Chief APAC+ANZ Magazine December 2021 | Page 51

TPG TELECOM

“ 5G is going to be really important when it comes to letting people have a seamless , work from anywhere experience ”

YAGO LOPEZ GENERAL MANAGER , WIRELESS &
TRANSMISSION NETWORKS , TPG TELECOM
keep our customers within our own network rather than give up ground to the NBN .”
Taking on the state-sponsored ISP is no small thing . However , Lopez is confident that Australian consumers deserve to be offered more choice and better value than a single government-run infrastructure body can provide . “ At the end of the day , we are providing choice and value to Australian consumers and enterprises ,” he says . “ The NBN is kind of a monopoly in that a lot of Australians only have one choice when it comes to their home connectivity , and we want to change that .”
Of course , in order to offer the worldclass service that might stand a chance of holding up in direct competition with the NBN for Australia ’ s home internet market , a successful 5G rollout is critical .
5G , Huawei , and Making Lemonade When the Australian government announced that it would ban Chinese tech firm Huawei from its 5G buildout back in 2018 , Vodafone found itself faced with a serious issue . “ Before the ban , we were planning to use Huawei as the natural vendor to upgrade our 4G network to non-standalone 5G , because we ' d already been working with them for a long time ,” recalls Lopez . “ When Huawei was banned from supplying Australia ' s 5G equipment , all of Vodafone ' s existing radio and transmission network infrastructure was Huawei , which presented a big challenge for us .”
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