Our company is playing a paramount role in the overall development of our country through implementing a wide range of advanced telecom technologies and digital solutions that streamline the working system of various institutions and enterprise businesses customers and enhance their business activities as well as simplify and improve the day-to day life of the citizens. Specifically, it focuses on the expansion of telecom infrastructures that align with the rapidly growing demands of our customers, enhancing customer satisfaction, improving the overall experience, and enabling the delivery of reliable and high-quality services.
In line with this, we are excited to announce today the official launch of a nationwide copper-to-fiber network switch-off initiative. This initiative marks a significant advancement in our telecom infrastructure for it will enable us to provide our valued customers with significantly faster speeds and an overall superior quality telecom services far better than copper network that has been widely used in the telecom industry for over 150 years and 130 years at the National level in providing fixed line service along with providing internet services to customers for two decades.
This milestone project will allow fixed telecom service customers to easily switch off from the existing copper network to the superior service capacity fiber network free of charge. The initiative will benefit a total of 100,000 customers (60,000 customers in Addis Ababa and 40,000 in regional cities); and in the first phase it will enable 31,000 customers to migrate their copper network to fiber network. Moreover, we have planned to migrate 10,000 customers from the copper to the new fiber network in the areas where the Addis Ababa corridor development and renovation projects are being undertaken.The capacity of the existing copper network technology is limited to meet the current and future demands of the broadband customers for fast, superior quality and reliable services. Hence, in addressing these limitations, the new fiber network will play key roles and enable our customers to streamline their systems/applications that enhances operations requiring to simplify their day-to-day working activities aligned with their needs. Furthermore, the fiber network to be installed will remain unchanged when the customer needs to upgrade the capacity; and the capacity can be upgraded from 1GB to 10GB even to 50GB by simply changing the module of the fiber. Our company has invested heavily in this large-scale fiber network expansion infrastructure initiative and empower customers to migrate their services to a high-capacity fiber network with no additional cost.The deployment of the fiber network will sustainably address the existing copper infrastructure’s challenges to access new telecom and digital services at required speed and quality, specially to access the upcoming services that require high speed data transmission capacity with ultra-low latency and offer a reliable service for critical mission services, thereby ensuring in providing quality digital solutions such as cloud and edge computing, IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), entertainment, digital agriculture, health care, education, and smart homes and other digital solutions.Apart from providing high-speed capacity and superior quality internet services to fixed broadband service customers, this initiative will streamline their service delivery and increase their productivity. This fiber technology is also notably preferable for its crucial role in reducing the frequency of network failures facing the existing copper network and curbing fiber theft and accidents. It is also environmentally friendly, space saving, energy and cost efficient.This wide-ranging national initiative that requires huge investment has been planned and launched its implementation to fully migrate Addis Ababa’s copper network to fiber network within the coming three years, the major regional cities within the next five subsequent years and finally the remaining urban centers and districts.
Through this huge initiative, our company will be able to create a giant and reliable network capacity that can play a vital role in realizing digital Ethiopia empowering individuals, businesses, and government institutions to benefit from cutting-edge telecom and digital solutions through integrating them with high speed and quality fiber network.
In the first phase of the initiative , the areas in Addis Ababa city to be migrated from copper network to fiber network (Optical Access Networks /ODN) include South West Addis Ababa Zone: Bisrate Gabriel, Karl, Mekanisa and Tor Hayloch, in Central Addis Ababa Zone: Meskel Flower, in West Addis Ababa Zone: Kolfe, Shegole and Asko, in South Addis Ababa Zone: Kaliti, Saris, Akaki, Bole Bulbula, Gofa, Gotera and Kirkos, in East Addis Ababa Zone: CMC, Jacross, Goro, Ayat, Gurd Shola and Gerji and in North Addis Ababa Zone: Shiro Meda, Kotebe, Sidist Kilo, Lamberet, Arat Kilo and Shola Gebeya areas.Dear our valued fixed-line customers, we sincerely call upon you in advance to join hands and collaborate for the success of this grand national initiative, which would ensure the delivery of fast, high quality and reliable fixed broadband internet and telephone services.
September 24, 2017
Ethio telecom