01 Oct 2013

Botswana Telecommunication Corporation Limited (BTCL) has made a significant progress towards improving regional international inter-connectivity, says acting chief executive officer, Mr Christopher Diswai.

Mr Diswai was speaking during a three day workshop on the Regional Telecommunication Backhaul and Submarine Networks hosted by BTCL in conjunction with Southern African Telecommunication Association (SATA). He said BTCL had managed to lay down the necessary fibre optic backbone network throughout the country and was now connected to all its neighbouring counties of Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Internationally, he said they had managed to connect to both the Indian Ocean through EASSY cable and Atlantic Ocean through the WACS Cable. “BTC is proud to be hosting such a workshop that has far reaching benefits to the people of Botswana and the region,” he added. The gathering brought together decision makers and experts with a technical, financial and commercial background including network design and operation departments to discuss interconnectivity amongst SADC member states.

The gathering is expected to also discuss regional plans, review progress and implementation of interconnectivity between member states to the rest of the world via submarine optical fibre cables. Mr Diswai said the meeting created an opportunity for all SADC telecommunication administration, especially the land-locked countries like Botswana to be able to understand and discuss solutions to the challenges faced in terms of being connected to the international submarine cables.

He believed that the workshop would bring positive results as a lot of progress would be made to meet the telecommunication and ICTs terrestrial and submarine connectivity challenges at hand and to facilitate provision of quality services at affordable rates within the region and countries comparable with the rest of the world.

For his part, the executive secretary of SATA Mr Jacob Munodawafa urged the SADC region member states to ensure that their networks are ready to meet the traffic demands. He said with the rapid growth of the Internet and mobile communications and the convergence of technology and services there is need to make sure networks are ready to meet the traffic demands. He said as operators design their networks, they should start thinking of how much bandwidth per device or machine taking into account machine to machine communication and internet.

“As we tackle our agenda on planning, construction and optimisation of the backhaul links, international technical standards need be adhered to so that in the end the region stays ahead with a network that is seamless, transparent and interoperable. We should also take into account the new directions of implementing software defined networks (SDNs)”, he added.

Mr Munodawafa noted that the objective of the meeting was to understand the current situation of Backhaul and connectivity of Southern Africa to submarine cables and also look at the key challenges to build an ideal operator’s framework for broadband services. He said Backhaul is one of the most pressing issues facing network operators in our region and worldwide.

Massive growth in data traffic driven by smart phone adoption and usage, coupled with more spectrally efficient air interfaces such as HSPA+3G or LTE, which will be adding increased pressure on backhaul requirements.

In addition, the executive secretary informed the gathering that more than 11meetings on the Backhaul have taken place and a lot is happening in terms of inter-connecting in the countries and to the submarine cables. “Since this working group was established in 2005, we have seen many success stories. In 2005 we were talking of missing links on both the sea and the land and now it’s a thing of the past”, he said.

Mr Munodawafa revealed that many submarine cables were launched and landed on the shores connecting their region to the rest of the world. SADC is fully connected and many countries have implemented high speed broadband networks and national backbones. The backhaul is a very important component of the infrastructure as it connects the core network to the rest of the global ICT network. ENDS