World Telecom Labs (WTL) on Tuesday announced that Interconnect Nigeria (ICN), one of Nigeria’s interconnect exchange carriers, is now using its award-winning 2nd generation VoIP switches to transfer voice traffic between the country’s cellular networks and ICN’s VoIP network.

WTL has a long and successful relationship with Nigeria’s interconnect exchange carriers which are using its 2nd Generation VoIP switches to build new inter-city routes that can transfer very high volumes of calls with total reliability.

WTL will be discussing its contribution to Nigeria’s telecoms market at the Commonwealth Broadband Forum 2015 which ends in Abuja today.

The forum is hosted by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

WTL’s VoIP links are a very cost-efficient way to link Nigeria’s cities which has traditionally been a very costly exercise; it was previously more expensive to transport traffic between Lagos and Abuja than from Lagos to London.

To date, more than 3 billion (three thousand million) minutes have passed through the new VoIP links and Nigeria’s experience provides a blueprint for other countries in Africa which are looking for ways to increase capacity and speeds, and reduce traffic on congested inter-city links.

Last year WTL’s role in helping the development of Nigeria’s telecoms industry was recognised at the 10th Nigerian Telecoms Awards when it picked up the Most Innovative Product award.

WTL’s work in Nigeria was also highlighted at the AfricaCom awards and the Global Carrier awards cementing the company’s position as Africa’s pre-eminent VoIP vendor.

WTL’s 2nd Generation VoIP switches have been deployed at ICN’s Network Operating Centre in Abuja replacing inferior equipment bought from another vendor.  The price which Nigeria’s interconnect carriers can charge for their services is fixed by the Nigerian Communications Commission. Therefore, the interconnect carriers compete on customer service and network reliability.

WTL previously installed equipment and helped ICN with the successful implementation of Nigeria’s Mobile Number Portability programme which ICN runs on behalf of the Nigerian Communications Commission.

Jude Chukwuma, CTO of ICN, said “We engaged with WTL since 2007 and are happy with their solution and service delivery. We are delighted with the prospect of expanding our business with WTL. Our business is dependent on providing a high quality network and WTL is able to deliver this. We wish we started this earlier. Not only that, its team are extremely generous with their knowledge, time and expertise, and were able to establish a reliable new node in our network for us within one week.”

Admiral A.A. Madueke, chairman of ICN, said “With WTL’s help, ICN is improving our nation’s telecoms infrastructure which is, of course, vital to our economic development.  We will continue to work with high-quality vendors like WTL so we can continue to provide a fast and reliable service to our customers.”

Also, Leigh Smith, MD of WTL, said “Operators across the world are now looking to VoIP as a cost-effective way of increasing voice capacity and improving service reliability.  We have carved a real niche for ourselves as an innovative company with award-winning VoIP switches.”

WTL is a key VoIP player in emerging markets. Its award-winning range of 2nd generation VoIP and hybrid VoIP/TDM switches have been specifically designed to replace the huge, expensive, maintenance-heavy switches that have traditionally been used to transfer VoIP traffic onto other networks. 

WTL’s 2nd Generation VoIP switches provide operators with a cost-effective and evolutionary path to VoIP and have been deployed by multiple operators throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Benefits include increased capacity  – WTL’s unique compression techniques reduces the amount of data used per call and enables a higher density of calls in the same bandwidth whilst maintaining high QoS.

Greater flexibility and reliability – WTL makes it easier for mobile operators to increase and reduce capacity as demand fluctuates, at the same time maintaining reliability under heavy traffic loads.

Interoperability – easy to integrate with existing infrastructure of operators and allows VoIP to be adopted gradually

Fully redundant – WTL has created a self-healing, clustered architecture that gives n+1 redundancy.

One of the advantages of this is that in the case of one server failing the extra traffic is distributed across the others.