World Telecom Labs (WTL) on Tuesday announced that its specialist high capacity voice switching equipment will be deployed by five of Nigeria’s interconnecting exchange carriers.
Licensed by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the carriers – Breeze Micro, Solid, Exchange, Niconnx and ICN – were established to increase competition and transparency in the Nigerian telecom marketplace.
The four leading mobile operators in Nigeria are now all required to divert 10% of their inter-carrier voice and SMS traffic to one of these operators.
The five licensees are initially acting as wholesale interconnect carriers for TDM voice traffic and are using WTL’s switches to transfer traffic between the four existing mobile networks.
WTL has also helped each carrier with its billing processes. It has developed a sophisticated billing system for Breeze Micro tailored for its specific needs and also provides a traffic capture system which enables the other four carriers to produce detailed accounts and bills.
Jiahd Jaafar, CTO of Breeze Micro, said “This is a high throughput business which handles hundreds of millions of calls every day. We need switches in our PoP (Point of Presence) which are market-proven, totally reliable and can scale as our business grows. The WTL team are experts in voice and we value their knowledge, experience and flexible approach. We know that our WTL system will be easy and cost-effective to scale as our business grows and that’s extremely important to us”.
WTL’s voice switches have been specifically designed to replace the huge, expensive, maintenance-heavy switches which have traditionally been used to transfer high volume voice traffic between networks.
For Breeze Micro, Solid, Exchange, Niconnx and ICN, WTL’s suite of switches have a number of advantages over traditional switches including they are VoIP ready – WTL specialises in VoIP switches and so the switches installed in Nigeria can be easily switched from traditional TDM to VoIP once the existing mobile operators are ready to use VoIP as a means of interconnecting.
“Highly reliable even under very heavy traffic loads, WTL’s switches are also simple and easy to run so they don’t need a dedicated, full-time engineer (unlike traditional switching equipment).
” Service and support – WTL offers constant support and consultancy to all five operators.
“Small footprint –WTL’s switches are physically small occupying 0.5 racks compared to the multiple racks needed by traditional voice switching vendors. Smaller racks means less power and reduced OPEX.
“WTL’s switches are also easy to scale. The five Nigerian licensees all plan to set up multiple POPs throughout Nigeria to enable local switching and so want to ensure that their CAPEX is kept low,” he said.
Leigh Smith, managing director of WTL, said “I sincerely hope that the fact that five out of the six carriers in Nigeria have chosen to use WTL shows that we are leading the market in terms of innovative, cost-effective voice switching. Once their businesses are fully established we will be able to help with optimisation of voice traffic to increase capacity and reduce costs especially as the other major suppliers are not offering a viable VoIP solution”.
WTL’s VOIP and TDM voice optimisation services and equipment are being used by a number of operators throughout Africa and the Middle East. WTL also featured at the 4th edition of NigeriaCom conference in Lagos.