Sun Microsystems technology lies at the heart of Ethiopia's only national service provider, Ethiopia Telecoms, which recently signed a US $6.7 million deal with Dimension Data to facilitate the implementation of a nationwide broadband Internet project.
Ethiopia Telecoms is now able to improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of its their currently strained ISP service, which had become strained and unable to meet the growth.
This is Ethiopia's third main broadband project and follows the implementation of two major projects, namely broadband VSAT and broadband multimedia. Dimension Data implemented the nationwide ISP project over four months and deployed the two main points of presence (POPs) and assisted Ethiopian Telecoms with the deployment of another 14 points of presence (POPs) across the greater Addis Ababa region as well as other national geographies to ensure connectivity to all communities.
According to Paul Mostert, partner sales manager at Sun Microsystems in SA, Ethiopia is aggressively using technology to boost the economy and help bring the country's education levels in line with the rest of Africa and other developing nations to be able to compete on an international level.
"Sun Microsystems is proud to be part of this expansion and has been involved in similar projects to build Ethiopia's ICT capacity," says Mostert.
He believes that the project is significant because it will upgrade the existing ISP infrastructure from a service with many challenges to a mission critical, world class, service delivery platform that can deliver standard messaging and calendaring to multimedia, video conferencing and video on demand.
"Educational courses are already being delivered to remote classrooms via Ethiopia Telecoms' broadband infrastructure."
Sun Microsystems' component of the project consists of a cluster of servers to implement security, web services, messaging authentication of users, network management, billing, customer relationship management (CRM) as well as a Storage Area Network (SAN) comprising sufficient disk capacity and backup facilities.
"Ethiopia Telecom selected Sun because of its reputation in telecommunication environments and the value of its technology if the total cost of ownership (TCO) is taken into account," explains Mostert.
A spokesman for Ethiopia Telecom says: "Ethiopia's government organisations are our biggest clients and we made a commitment to them to improve ISP services in Ethiopia," says a spokesperson at the company. " Also our main business driver is to increase the revenue derived from our data services so it is a natural process to grow our network."
Following the implementation, the network now has carrying capacity for approximately 100 000 Internet customers. It makes provision for 2 000 dedicated Internet customers via either Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and fibre and Metro-Ethernet connections.
Dimension Data provided value-added services including a complete managed security offering, IP telephony, virtual fax, unified messaging on mail servers and dynamic Web hosting services.
"There is a huge potential to unlock business opportunities in Africa and to offer ICT services. We viewed the project in Ethiopia as an opportunity to do things differently. Essentially our aim was to contribute to the growth and sustainability of businesses in East Africa," says Barry Herman, Account Director, Dimension Data, Service Providers, Africa.
Ethiopia Telecom is the only ISP in Ethiopia. Prior to the implementation, it only contained 9,575 Internet subscribers, in a country housing 70 million citizens. Its network infrastructure had limited capacity and did not ensure the reliability and availability of their Internet services. One of its main aims with the improved services was to increase its subscriber base to 45 000 before 2005.
The company required not only improved services to their existing clients, which include big corporates such as Ethiopian Airlines, but also to extend services to more residential users residing in rural areas. In pursuing this mission, the company aimed to bring into market broadband VSAT, Internet, and data services.
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