Ethiopia’s state-owned operator Ethio Telecom and ZTE said on Wednesday they have deployed an FTTR all-optical network for the office building of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) project.
According to ZTE, the office building plays a crucial role in coordination, dispatch, and daily operations of GERD, the largest hydropower project in Africa. As such, it requires a highly reliable, secure, and intelligent network.
Ethio Telecom and ZTE said they opted for a tailor-made FTTR-B (enterprise-grade fibre to the room) solution because it overcomes the limitations of traditional Ethernet networks – namely slower data speeds, complex architectures, high deployment costs, low reliability, and difficult operations and maintenance.
The GERD optical project features ZTE’s ZXEN G100S FTTR-B gateway and 34 optical access points (APs) providing gigabit fibre coverage across all office areas, meeting rooms, and recreational spaces. The network supports data access, voice communication, shared printing, and security monitoring, all of which are integrated into a single network architecture that ZTE says can reduce deployment costs by 25%.
On the O&M side, the network is integrated with the Zenic One unified cloud management platform, which ZTE claims improves maintenance efficiency by 30% by enabling topology visualization, automatic fault detection, remote troubleshooting, and report generation.
ZTE and Ethio Telecom said they will continue their partnership to deploy FTTR solutions across Ethiopia, particularly to accelerate digital transformation of national-level projects.
The GERD project on the Blue Nile is planned to have over 5,000MW of generating capacity upon completion. The project has been in the works since 2011, and began generating power in February 2022, despite still being under construction. According to Libya Express, government officials said last month the dam was 98.66% completed.
The GERD project has been a bone of contention between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, the latter two of whom are downstream from the dam and are concerned about the impact of the project on their water supply.
