A group of us from ECI, along with Ivan Soldo from NewTelco, traveled to Uganda in East Africa in early December for a telecom workshop. I’ll get to the details on the workshop in a moment, but I must first say that Uganda is an absolutely beautiful country, with a very lush, very green landscape. Renowned for its fish, Uganda is home to Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world. The lake is famous for perch, which is exported worldwide and is at the center of heated debate between authorities and biologists. If you have the chance to visit this wonderful place, I recommend it without reservation.
Now, a little about the workshop…
We hosted around 60 telecom executives at the amazing
Kampala Serena Resort for a one-day workshop on the “(R)evolution in the telecoms market: migration to next-generation networks.” The workshop was opened by a representative from the Ugandan Ministry of ICT (Information Communication Technology) – James Kasigwa, Assistant Commissioner, Infrastructure. In his address, Mr. Kasigwa stated:
… The ICT applications and networks in Uganda must be built in a way that provides people who are living in our country with access to efficient and faster connectivity anytime to the Internet at affordable prices. Only this will generate the benefits we are looking for. This challenge can only be managed in close cooperation between the government, network operators and network infrastructure vendors like ECI Telecom…
In addition to presentations on
1Net, a framework for addressing the challenges involved in network transition to NGN, sessions on mobile backhauling, packet-optical transport and open access solutions were given. We also shared several real-life case studies. The first was on a turnkey project that we executed for Togo Telecom, a fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) network. You can get the details of the story
here. Next, Ivan Soldo of NewTelco, a solutions provider based in Frankfurt, Germany, presented on collocation rooms, rental agreement services and global interconnection services. Finally, we discussed a major interoperability lab that we’re hosting and operating for the Gauteng province in South Africa.
We look forward to returning to Africa soon for more workshops of this kind, and if you are interested in participating in a telecoms workshop in the EMEA region, please do
reach out to me.
Until next time,