Alcatel-Lucent has signed a three-year agreement to modernise the IP/MPLS and optical transport networks of the Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL).

The project will lay the foundations for the launch of 4G LTE and cater for immediate demands for fixed and mobile access as mobile phone use in Tanzania grows by 20% a year.

With mobile penetration at 75% of the population there is considerable potential for growth, according to Alcatel-Lucent, with expansion of undersea cable connectivity and the launch of the National ICT Broadband Backbone expected to fuel more demand for data services. In response to the increases in national broadband capacity, several new comms service providers have launched in Tanzania, it said. TTCL currently has to cater for 300,000 fixed network subscribers but the data traffic increases catalysed by the presence of a 4G LTE network will test its ability to maintain quality from the same infrastructure.

To cater for the load on the telco’s infrastructure, Alcatel-Lucent will install its IP routing and 100G agile optical networking (AON) DWDM technology as a means of converging fixed and mobile access on one network with unified management across the IP and optical layers. The equipment used will include Alctel-Lucent’s  7750 Service Router family, 7210 Service Access Switch and 7705 Service Aggregation Router for routing and aggregation functionality in the core, metro and access network. The 1830 Photonic Service Switch will be used to build an optical transport network (OTN) and provide dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDN) functions. Unified network management will be provided by Alcatel-Lucent’s 5620 Service Aware Manager.

By the end of December 2015 the new network should extend to the nation’s capital Dodoma, the financial centre of Dar Es Salaam and the cites of Arusha, Morogoro, and Mwanza in Phase One of deployment. As Alcatel-Lucent migrates services to the new network it will provide training and services such as site surveys, design, installation, testing and commissioning.