By Prince Osuagwu

About five of Nigeria’s interconnect exchange carriers have been commended for recording over one billion minutes in traffic on the World Telecom Labs, WTL’s 2nd generation VoIP switches.

All five carriers, including Breeze Micro, Exchange, ICN, Niconnx and Solid, according to WTL, were celebrated and presented with a trophy each, at the annual NigeriaCom telecoms conference and exhibition, recently.

Licensed by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, the carriers were established to increase competition and transparency in the Nigerian telecom marketplace. The four leading mobile operators in Nigeria are now all required to divert 10% of their inter-carrier voice and SMS traffic to one of these operators.

The five licensees started offering services at the end of last year initially acting as wholesale interconnect carriers for TDM voice traffic. They are using WTL’s switches to transfer traffic between the four existing mobile networks. WTL is also helping the operators with their billing systems and the optimisation of voice traffic to increase capacity and reduce costs.

MD of WTL, Leigh Smith, said “what a triumph for the NCC. The benefits of introducing the new carriers are clear: a huge amount of traffic is being taken off the infrastructure of the established carriers in Nigeria thereby freeing up capacity, increasing speeds and reducing latency. In addition, there is greater transparency and openness in the market.”

Jihad Jaafar, CTO of Breeze Micro, said: “The billionth minute is a significant moment for both Breeze Micro and our interconnect exchange carrier colleagues. WTL has been instrumental in our success. Its team of experts continues to be generous in sharing their knowledge and experience which is benefiting both the telecoms market and indeed the people of Nigeria.”

WTL’s 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. They are said to be capable of handling 1000s of simultaneous calls. They were awarded second place in the Best Cost Efficiency Innovation category at last year’s AfricaCom awards

WTL’s VOIP and TDM voice optimisation services and equipment are being used by a number of operators throughout Africa and the Middle East and have a number of advantages over traditional switches.

The Belgium-based company specialises in VoIP switches and so the switches installed in Nigeria can be easily switched from traditional TDM to VoIP once the existing mobile operators are ready to use VoIP as a means of interconnecting.

Its switches are also said to be simple and easy to run so they don’t need a dedicated, full-time engineer unlike traditional switching equipment.