Qatar’s leading telco Ooredoo continues to stake claims for regional or world firsts, with deployments of private mobile networks from both Nokia and Ericsson for the country’s oil and gas industry – embracing both offshore and onshore operations. Billed as the first private cellular networks in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) “for the energy sector”, these will initially support at least 20,000 ‘subscribers’ on the offshore grid. They will in some cases replace ageing WiFi and even WiMAX networks. An alternative would have been fiber coupled with the latest WiFi 6E, but that is struggling to compete with cellular in situations where a combination of indoor and outdoor coverage is required over a fairly large, distributed site. Satellite also enters…