The Nigerian mobile space has grown to be the biggest in Africa ranked by the subscriber base and revenue and remains attractive despite the high cost of doing business. There are 4 major and many minor operators currently licensed and active. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) originally set the date for commencement of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) as long ago as May 2009.

Recently the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Eugene Juwah assured the country that MNP would be fully implemented before the end of the first quarter of 2013.

WTL became involved in this prestigious project in the second half of 2012. Existing customer ICN had won the contract to operate the MNP service in the country and called on a number of leading vendors to supply infrastructure and expertise.

Breeze Micro Ltd is a NCC-licensed Interconnect Exchange operator based in Abuja, Nigeria. This is a start-up activity with the advantage of being able to source the very latest equipment on which to base their new business.

With a very demanding set of technical and operational requirements and against tough competition from all the leading vendors in the market, WTL were delighted to be awarded the deal, worth more than $1M over the next 3 years.

This significant contract appointed WTL to be the lead supplier of voice and SMS switching infrastructure and Wholesale Billing for a major new force on the Nigerian telecoms scene.

Background
Dialost is a fast growing VoIP operator with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin and Moscow. The company specialises in collecting and terminating VoIP and TDM traffic between European and former Soviet Union countries. In the past this has been done with an infrastructure based on a Mera SoftSwitch and Cisco. To continue their growth Dialost needed carrier-class media and signalling gateways to allow SS7 connection to the TDM world.

The Need for Portability After an extensive selection process Dialost chose a WTL solution based on the SoIP Gateway. This SS7 to IP gateway is scalable from 1 to 32 E1s with matching numbers of VoIP calls. The initial system offered Dialost 8 E1s with SS7 signalling links to 2 carriers. The product’s small footprint was also important as it had to be placed in rented rack space in a commercial co- location facility.

The client offers call centre services for the French speaking market. Customers include one of the leading French clothing catalogues. To take advantage of lower wage costs and other reduced overheads, part of the business is located in Tunisia. Unfortunately this business had become a victim of its own success – rapid growth had used up all the available telecoms capacity. Upgrading would be difficult and costly.

The existing system used a 128Kb international leased line from France Telecom. Using standard TDM equipment this allowed only a handful of seats to be used in the Call Centre. With greater capacity the client also wanted control the number of calls that each of their customers was using at any one time.

Background
The Moroccan national telecommunications regulatory authority has initiated a ‘Universal Access’ project to improve availability of internet and telephony services for the whole population regardless of location. For the more remote locations that are situated beyond the range of terrestrial networks a satellite-based solution is required. This is a major initiative of national importance which will see almost 8000 locations installed over the next 4 years. Such a high profile project requires not only satellite and telephony infrastructure but also a whole Pre-Paid business model to underpin the ongoing commercial viability.

The WTL infrastructure solution
Working with Nortis, a local partner for system integration and logistics, WTL proposed a solution based on deploying WTL equipment in all targeted Tele-Centres alongside a VSAT terminal. WTL’s Mini- PVXs and 4 or 8 port VoIP Gateways are located in every site to allow voice calls to be made and transmitted efficiently over the VSAT. The role of the PVX is to optimise the VoIP traffic using WTL’s patented NOP bandwidth saving technology which ensures that the minimum possible satellite bandwidth is used.

Background
Xplorium is one of the biggest international wholesale VoIP carriers, with a significant international presence: Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. One of the company’s specialities is carrying the international traffic of GSM operators in addition to many other varied retails services. In a number of locations the traffic is carried via satellite and this gives rise to concerns about the voice quality and the efficiency of transmission. In 2007 Xplorium were looking for equipment for their VoIP PoPs that would address these issues.

WTL Solution
WTL proposed several products for different parts of the Xplorium network. The key factor was to use WTL’s patented NOP (Network Optimisation Protocol) bandwidth saving technology. Simply put, this technique packs multiple VoIP voice samples into a single IP packet. Because the samples are not modified, quality is unaffected but, on multi-call links, significant savings can be made on the packet overhead. Also, since single samples are taken from each active call rather than queuing multiple samples from the same call, delay is not increased.

Background
The Nigerian mobile space has grown to be the biggest in Africa ranked by the subscriber base and revenue and remains attractive despite the high cost of doing business. There are 4 major and many minor operators currently licensed and active. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) originally set the date for commencement of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) as long ago as May 2009.

Recently the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Eugene Juwah assured the country that MNP would be fully implemented before the end of the first quarter of 2013.WTL became involved in this prestigious project in the second half of 2012. Existing customer ICN had won the contract to operate the MNP service in the country and called on a number of leading vendors to supply infrastructure and expertise.

The Need for Portability 
Mobile Number Portability (MNP) is a very important concept enabling subscribers to preserve their numbers while switching to a different mobile network. This gives subscribers flexibility in the quality, price and variety of telecommunications services they choose to purchase. 

Background
Deregulation of the Telecommunication industry in Nigeria came with the usual problems of a multi-operator scenario, namely, physical interconnectivity and settlement of the accompanying charges. Interconnect Clearing House Nigeria (ICN) was licensed by the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) to provide and operate Interconnect Exchange Services throughout Nigeria. The principle of a clearing house is that as an independent third party, it is not in competition with the operators for subscribers and is focused on the twin issues of adequate interconnect capacity and prompt settlement of interconnect usage charges. ICN had grown rapidly and as a result of its success needed more switch capacity and greater flexibility.

When established, ICN, deployed cutting edge telecommunications technology of that time, namely a large SIEMENS EWSD, fully redundant TDM switch with a maximum system configuration capacity of 8064 E1”s.

However, it had become clear that as technology and the Nigerian market had evolved this needed to be upgraded.

The Problem
ICN faced 2 principal problems with their existing infrastructure: firstly, it could not keep pace with the industry’s migration to VoIP and secondly, it was a large monolithic switch located in Lagos whilst the business was increasingly distributed around the country.