Lagos — Showcases at BWF-05

CONTRACT of 40 million Pounds has been given to Siemens Communications by the Malian national operator, Sotelma to expand its nationwide Global System for Mobile communications (GSM).

This development is coming as Siemens showcased its innovative carrier Ethernet technology at the Broadband World Forum Asia-05.

As part of the project, Siemens added 65 new sites to the network in order to improve coverage in areas such as Bamako, Kati and Kayes and reach new markets like Timbuktu, Koulikoro or Sikasso. Siemens also offered training programme to enable Sotelma's technicians and engineers to perform their own administration, maintenance work and spare parts management for the system. The contract has a total volume of almost 40 million Euros.

Siemens also replaced the current switch with a Siemens D900 MSC/VLR communication platform including a subscriber database (home location register), in addition to a new transmission backbone, the scope of delivery included an Intelligent Network (IN) platform which enables Sotelma to offer its customers prepaid services flexibly and efficiently.

President of Mobile Networks at Siemens Communications, Mr. Christoph Caselitz said "Mali's mobile phone market has huge potential. By 2007, Sotelma plans to expand its subscriber base from now 2 percent to 8 percent of the population; that is then the equivalent of 800,000 people. While this is an ambitious target, the odds of reaching it are good".

Expanding the telecommunications network is one of the top priorities for Mali's government. A 20-year plan was approved in 1992 and since 2002 a separate ministry has handled its implementation.

In 1989 the government-owned Société de Télécommunications du Mali (Sotelma) was founded to develop fixed telephony. In 1999 Sotelma in turn set up Malitel, Mali's first mobile network.

However, the government's aim is a free market environment, and a second operator was granted a license in 2002. To counter this competition and become market leader, Sotelma had since found a strong partner to expand its network.

Meanwhile, Siemens showcased its Passive Optical Networks (PON) at the Broadband WorldForum Asia 2005.

PON allows individual homes, larger residential or office buildings, and even entire premises to be connected to public telecommunications networks directly via fiber.

Across great distances, they provide users with a very high transfer capacity, which is essential for all modern data services such as high-resolution television reception or home entertainment services.

Siemens Communications first presented its Carrier Ethernet offering, which allows network operators to construct a uniform Ethernet-based infrastructure right down to the subscriber, at last year's Broadband Forum in Asia. In the first instance, the solution started out by using copper wire with Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology as the transfer medium.

The next stage was an expansion of the Carrier Ethernet portfolio to include the Passive Optical Networks (PON) option.

PON uses fiber optic cables as the transport medium for services with a high bit rate. This involves the incorporation of a passive splitter, which bundles several glass fibers and carries one fiber to a central switch.

In this way, up to 128 Optical Network Terminators (ONT) or Optical Network Units (ONU) could be connected to each PON port. ONTs supply individual customers with a direct fiber connection (fiber to the home), while an ONU provides network access to several customers via DSL or Ethernet.

The advantages of PON for network operators and their customers are clear: as well as higher range, glass fiber essentially offers a much higher transfer capacity than copper cable, which can reach 1.2 GBit/s in both directions (upload and download). PON thus enables the use of new applications and services, such as high-resolution television, video telephony, e-learning or even business applications. The passive splitting of the fibers means that expensive and high-maintenance active network elements are not necessary, while at the same time the number of optical components is kept to a minimum.