Description

This consultancy report describes the outcome of a specialized mission authorized by the Ministry of Capacity Building, Gov’t of Ethiopia to undertake a short survey of the existing, vibrant and progressive ICT industry in Ethiopia in February/March 2004 and to report on two innovative technical demonstrations organized in conjunction with the public and the private sector. These technical demonstrations were designed to introduce low-cost, flexible use, ICTs for deployment in “zero-infrastructure” areas to policy makers and engineers in the ICT industry in order to address their needs to expand ICT services into areas where traditional telecommunications infrastructure and planning has been estimated to be unprofitable.
The particular technology practice chosen for this short mission, “Broadband Multi-Service Switching Transmission and Distribution Architecture”, or BMSTDA, originated from public demands by the Internet user community in South-Asia in 1999 and is one of a family of recognized related low-cost technologies used by ICT practitioners around the world. In this report, a considerable amount of detail is presented on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the technology as well as estimates of the cost of implementing large scale deployments as well as an estimate of the benefits that can be achieved if wide spread deployment is undertaken.