Major Breakthrough in Africa for GMK

GMK have just signed a major deal with the Republic of Sierra Leone to act as a key strategic partner in the overhaul of its telecoms infrastructure following the 10 year civil war in Sierra Leone.

Strategic Development of Telecommunications In Sierra Leone

1. Weak Economy

Due to persistently negative growth rates from deteriorating economic performance, Sierra Leone has over the last 20 years been classified as the ‘least developed country’. A ten-year civil war that started in 1991 pushed the already weak economy to the brink of total collapse. Hundreds of thousands of refugees were created, as well as massive overcrowding problem in the main settlement areas of Freetown, Bo, Kenema and Makeni.

2. Challenges facing the post-war Government

These are quite formidable and include:

• An economy that is all but destroyed
• Dramatically reduced government revenue base
• Most of the infrastructure has been destroyed or seriously damaged

3. Scope for Economic Recovery

Sierra Leone has some key assets that if it could leverage, could form the basis of a sound economic recovery. The key assets are:

• Rich in mineral and agricultural resources
• Rich in cheap human resource
• Democratic governance that could draw significant international support

4. GMK's view of the Key Role of Telecommunications in the Recovery Strategy

The key to leveraging the assets of minerals, agriculture and human resource is the telecommunications framework. 'A nation’s communications and information technology infrastructure is the central nervous system of its economy'. Without proper long term planning in this area, no nation can hope to compete in the coming times.

Although the obvious need and demand is for voice services (fixed and mobile), Data communications coupled with information technology has the greatest scope to promote economic recovery compared with voice communications and at a much lower investment.

If properly developed, it could form a countrywide framework that helps to co-ordinate the deployment of:

• Government administration of key public services ( e.g. health, education, agriculture, refugees, housing aid, ration distribution)
• Digital commodity markets
• Digital trading and settlement
• E-commerce initiates
• Call centres
• Banking
• Business processes

Such a framework would dramatically improve Sierra Leone’s ability to leverage its natural resources for economic recovery by allowing its business community to more fully enter into relationships with the international economic community and to successfully compete.

Because it is such a highly specialized area, data and information technology is often not given the importance it deserves, and by simply providing access to the Internet, the telecommunications data responsibility is often considered as having been met.

But a word of warning here. The temptation is to concentrate on voice communications only, especially in the mobile GSM area where the immediate demand is very strong. Of course, initiatives must be put into place to address these obvious needs.

However, If a significant data services initiative is not a key part of any strategic plan for developing the telecommunications framework. Then there is a danger that the telecommunications framework will purely be developed to support an ultimate privatization program who’s ultimate purpose will be to make money for the private entities involved, at the expense of the advancement of Sierra Leone’s economic recovery.

5. GMK Telecom as a Strategic Development Partner

GMK's considerable experience in operating call shops, pre-paid services and billing, especially in African and Asian communities is important in the first phase where GMK will be upgrading Sierratel's subscriber services to include pre-paid and international direct dial (IDD). This will involve installation of new switching equipment and billing software.

GMK will also be handling upgrades of signaling between Sierratel and all interconnects. Currently a mixture of MFC-R2 and CCITT No. 5 is being used. The aim is to upgrade all interconnect signaling to SS7.

GMK also has a direct interconnect to Sierratel via satellite and can provide wholesale carrier services to and from Sierra Leone. All of this is being done using next generation voice-over-ip and softswitch technology through GMK's own network hub in the United Kingdom.

GMK will also be supplying VSAT trunk links to connect the provincial towns which have suffered due to microwave towers being damaged in the war which has severely restricted trunk links between the major provincial towns.

The second phase will be the deployment of an IP network throughout Sierra Leone for Internet and VPN's.

This will be followed by the development of a datacentre to host a series of information technology services that will be accessible by the Internet, VPN's and mobiles.

Unlike many telco's today that are only comfortable operating a circuit-switched voice environment, GMK has skills in traditional circuit-switched as well as packet-switched voice-over-IP technologies.

GMK also has significant experience is the development and deployment of large scale enterprise software applications over a distributed telecom's network.

The applications are hosted at a datacentre on a new class of application server.

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