ZTE, Ethio telecom Build Africa’s First All-Optical Government Office

Led by Ethiopia’s state-owned operator, Ethio telecom, ZTE provided a full suite of services, from a comprehensive solution design to equipment supply and implementation support. This project marks a new milestone in the deepening collaboration between the two parties in digital infrastructure development, injecting strong momentum into the informatization of Ethiopia’s key national projects.

Read More: Optical Distribution Networks: The Foundation of High-Speed Internet

The GERD, the largest hydropower project in Africa, has emerged as a powerful symbol of Ethiopia’s national renaissance. It ensures nationwide power supply, supports industrial development, and drives rural electrification. As the central hub of the project, the GERD office building plays a crucial role in coordination, dispatch, and daily operations, and, thus, requires a highly reliable, secure, and intelligent network.

Traditional Ethernet networks often suffer from limited bandwidth and require three separate networks to support internet access, voice communication, and security surveillance. This results in complex architectures, high deployment costs, low reliability, and difficult operations and maintenance. To overcome these limitations, ZTE provided Ethio telecom with a tailor-made FTTR-B solution, transforming the GERD office building into Africa’s first all-optical government office benchmark.

• Seamless All-Optical Coverage: The deployment features the FTTR-B gateway, ZXEN G100S, paired with 34 optical access points (APs), achieving gigabit fiber coverage across all office areas, meeting rooms, and recreational spaces.
• 3-in-1 Unified Network: The solution supports a variety of services including data access, voice communication, shared printing, and security monitoring, which are integrated into a single network architecture and can reduce the deployment costs by 25%. The FTTR-B gateway includes a built-in voice server, enabling internal and external line interdialing, short number calling, and IP phone interoperability, thus, improving communication efficiency.
• Smart and Cost-Effective O&M: The system is integrated with ZTE’s self-developed unified cloud management platform, ZENIC ONE, which enables topology visualization, automatic fault detection, remote troubleshooting, and report generation, thereby improving the maintenance efficiency by 30%.
• Secure Access Management: The built-in portal authentication server ensures separate network access for employees and visitors, ensuring information security and supporting flexible office applications.

Interesting Read: The Impact of Fiber Optic Networks on Africa’s Digital Landscape

As an enterprise-grade FTTR solution, FTTR-B not only overcomes the wiring and bandwidth limitations of traditional Ethernet networks but also provides a reference model for building simple, efficient, secure, and intelligent network architectures for governments and enterprises. Moving forward, ZTE will continue its partnership with Ethio telecom to broaden the application of FTTR across the African market and boost the digital transformation of more national-level projects to jointly build a digital Africa and embrace an intelligent future.