WTL, ICN Win ‘Connecting W/Africa Award’ for VoIP Network

World Telecom Labs (WTL) and its customer Interconnect Clearinghouse Nigeria won in the Connecting West Africa category at the inaugural West Africa Com awards which took place in Dakar, Senegal on Wednesday evening.

The awards recognise the strength and wealth of talent in the West African Tech and Telco ecosystem.  In particular, the Connecting West Africa category recognises a successful initiative to improve access to communications in the region.

This could have been a pan-regional solution or a product designed to reach under-connected areas, with a focus on affordability and reliability.

Interconnect Clearinghouse Nigeria (ICN) is one of Nigeria’s wholesale inter-exchange carriers and was set up to increase capacity and speeds in the country.

It worked with WTL to build new intercity VoIP links to take traffic off congested links and these new links now carry millions of extra calls every day.

Together ICN and WTL have provided a blueprint for operators across Africa that need to take voice off overloaded legacy networks and give themselves scope to expand.

Leigh Smith, MD of World Telecom Labs, said, “This award demonstrates why operators across Africa and other emerging markets should follow ICN’s example in deploying VoIP to increase both voice capacity and improve service reliability.  We provide a cost-effective and evolutionary path to VoIP and our systems have been deployed by multiple operators throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East.”

Jude Chukwuma, CTO of ICN, said “We are delighted that our contributions to the improvement of Nigeria’s telecoms infrastructure have been recognised. I would like to congratulate the teams at both ICN and WTL on their innovative and inspiring work.”

Headquartered in Belgium with offices in Nigeria, Brazil and the UK, WTL helps operators in emerging markets to deploy cost-effective, reliable voice and data networks for both rural and urban environments.

WTL’s innovative, practical and cost-effective portfolio includes its awward-winning range of VoIP and hybrid VoIP/TDM switches which have been specifically designed to replace the huge, expensive, maintenance-heavy switches that have traditionally been used to transfer VoIP traffic onto other networks.

Also, Vivada (Village Voice and Data), specifically developed so that operators large and small can build low OPEX, low-CAPEX networks for all types of pre and post-paid customers with varying telecoms budgets including GSM for every type of handset; Wifi connectivity for smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs - and connectivity to cybercafés and hotspot call cabins.

Vivada includes a micro GSM base station, wifi routers and modems, backhaul integration, billing software, VoIP switches and an SMS server.

And Pre-Paid applications and signalling gateways for emerging carriers and telecom service operators.