Orange Botswana selects Alvarion

Alvarion was chosen by Orange Botswana for a WiMax deployment, using Alvarion's WiMax Forum Certified 4Motion end-to-end solution, reports IT News Africa.

The commercial network, built at the 2.5GHz frequency band, enables Orange Botswana to provide advanced data services to businesses and homes in Gaborone and Francistown, Botswana's two largest cities with a total population of 330 000.

The first network was opened in June last year in Gaborone. Following this successful deployment, Orange Botswana increased the coverage in Gaborone and launched a second network in Francistown in November 2008. Future extensions of the networks are planned in other areas throughout the country.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has begun an accelerated move to plug into the global broadband initiative, states The Guardian.

The NCC says it has shortlisted three existing telecoms operators from the over 50 that applied to run and manage the broadband programme.

The three unnamed companies, which are to be announced soon, will use their facilities to deploy broadband first in the 36 state capitals and later to other towns and cities across the country.

An unnamed cable company is embarking on a submarine cable project and building an open access fibre optic transmission cable which will run from Portugal into the crest of West Africa, says All Africa.

This project is to bridge the gap in the satellite network and to construct the most trusted, scalable and professionally managed international fibre optic network in Africa. It will initially land in Nigeria and Ghana before spreading out.

The company says in order to face this challenge it has arranged a 1.92Tbps capacity cable system which will terminate in Seixal, Portugal where it will interconnect with other cable systems to London, New York and key cities in Asia. The cable will also span 14 000km with approximately 7 000km in the first phase between Lagos and Portugal.