BAHIRDAR UNIVERSITY

BAHIRDAR INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

FACULTY OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

DEPARTMNT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING STREAM

Telecom Networks Individual Assignment I

On
Historical Evolution of Telecommunication in The Case of Ethiopia

Done By: Aman Siraj

ID No: 0800425

Submitted to: Mr Solomon M.

Submission Date: Nov 11, 2019G.C

Q. What was the historical evolution of telecommunication in the
case of Ethiopia?

INTRODUCTION
Telecommunication in Ethiopia was started with humble beginning more than hundred years ago
by established a telephone link between the capital city and some major provincial cities. The
first Ethiopia pioneer of telephone was Ras Mekonnen, who is cousin of Menilik II, came back
with telephone apparatus in 1889 after his visit of Italy. Telecommunications service was
introduced in Ethiopia by Emperor Menelik II in 1894 when the construction of the telephone
line from Harar to the capital city, Addis Ababa, was commenced. During that time fixed line
voice service is given, this is called Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Then the
interurban network was continued to expand satisfactorily in all other directions from the capital.
Many important centers in the Empire were interconnected by lines, thus facilitating long
distance communication with the assistants or operators at intermediate stations frequently acting
as verbal human repeaters between the distant calling parties.

Telecommunications Sector in Ethiopia (1894-1942)

In this particular period, the telecom has been renamed and restructured through different stages:

 First, the management of the service was under the Imperial Court of Menelik II in the
name of the “CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION OF TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH
SYSTEM OF ETHIOPIA” from 1890 up to 1907. Mr. Stevenin, a French citizen, was
appointed as the General Manager of the service.
 The service was renamed as “THE CENTRAL OFFICE OF POST, TELEGRAPH AND
TELEPHONE (PTT) SYSTEM OF ETHIOPIA” since 1907-1909. It was administered by
Emperor Menilik II’s Advisor, Mr. Al Fred Ilg, a Swiss man.
 Then the service was renamed as “MINISTRY OF POST, TELEGRAPH AND
TELEPHONE (PT and T)” in 1910. First, it was administered by Mr. Leo Shafno, a
French citizen and then replaced by the first Ethiopian administrators Lij Gizaw Bezabih,
Lij Beyene Yimer and their successors consecutively.

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1942-1952 (Post War Restoration)
After the independence from the Italian occupation, the re-established Ministry of PT and T took
over the running of Telephone, Telegraph and Radio communications. It, therefore, rehabilitated
the network of the whole country.

Under the Imperial Regime

The Imperial Board of Telecommunications of Ethiopia (IBTE) was established by the
proclamation No. 131 on October 15, 1952. The main purpose of the Board, as stated in its
establishment charter of article 5 was “to rehabilitate, extend, repair and maintain the
telecommunication facilities of Ethiopia and to engage in the business of telecommunication for
profit.”
In 1960 IBTE looked after the operational matters of central Ethiopia, a Regional office was
created at Addis Ababa. And at the same time, Radio Division was created separated from the
receding Technical Division bringing the number of Division Offices to seven during the same
period.

Under The Dergue Regime (1974-1991)

Under the Dergue regime, the Ethiopian telecommunications was renamed as follows:
 In October 1975, the organization was renamed as “THE PROVISIONAL MILITARY
GOVERNMENT OF SOCIALIST ETHIOPIA TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICES”
 It was renamed again as “ETHIOPIAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS AUTHORITY
(ETA) on January 1981. It retained its name as ETA up to November 1996.

N.B At this period, the telecommunication services had made a major change of technology
ranging from Automatic to Digital technology.

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Under the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
The telecommunications sector was restructured and two separate independent entities namely
the Ethiopian Telecommunications Authority (ETA) and the Ethiopian Telecommunications
Corporation (ETC) were established by Proclamation No. 49/1996 on November 1996.

Under the supervision of the ETA, the principal duty of ETC is maintaining and expanding
telecommunication services in the country and providing domestic and international telephone,
telex, and other communicate on services. In this respect, currently ETC is the only operator of
any telecommunication related service.

Present status of ETC

 Exchange capacity: At present, the total number of exchanges is 306 with a total
exchange capacity of 780,000 lines; out of this 171 are automatic Digital exchanges with
760,368 capacities of lines. The remaining lines are connected to manual exchanges.
 Local Network: By the end of June 2004, 91 Microwave, 43 UHF, 242 DRMASS, 281
VSAT, 78 VHF and 8 HF stations have been operational.
 Fixed Telephone Subscription & Traffic: The total number of fixed telephone
subscribers has reached 484,368. These subscribers had generated 2,225.14 million urban
metered calls and 17.7 million outgoing minutes.
 Internet Services: The Corporation has been providing internet services since 1997. The
number of subscribers has reached 12,155 by the end of June 2004. The current server
capacity is about 20 Mb. Ethio internet renders Domain name, web designing and web
hosting service .Metro Ethernet, Wireless internet, ADSL and GPRS services are planned
to be provisioned. The broadband internet project /40,000/ is also under way and
expected to be commissioned soon.
 DDN (Digital Data Networking): ETC established the service in 2001. By the end of
June 2004 the number of customers reached 91 with a circuit of 178. DDN best supports
the applications dedicated access to internet, point-of-sale applications, online
transactions, Audio/video Conferencing, telecommuting, Telemedicine, Distance
learning, wireless internet, ATM service, Virtual private Network (VPN) and
Internetworking (connection among Local Area Network- 3 LANs). The Broad Band

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 Multimedia network connects the capital with a high capacity metropolitan optical
network. Moreover, 13 other provisional towns are served by using radio digital system
by the end of June 2004.
 Mobile service: The provision of the service has begun in 1999 with a capacity of 36,000
lines in Addis Ababa. By the end of December 2004, the number of subscribers reached
about 207,000. ETC’s mobile service includes prepaid services, satellite mobile phone
services, International mobile roaming services, short message services and Voice mail
services. Call diverting, call barring and call waiting services are also obtainable from
Ethio mobile.
 International Links: For its international traffic services, ETC mainly uses its earth
station at Sululta which transmits and receives to and from both the Indian and the
Atlantic Oceans satellites. Currently, there are more than 2000 international circuits for
all purpose.
 Human Resource: At June, 2004 the company’s manpower totals 8,628.
 Institute of Telecommunication & Information Technology /ITIT/: ETC’s Institute
of Telecommunication and Information technology (ITIT), which is one of the oldest
telecom specialty training facilities in Africa. Recently, it started to provide post-
graduate program training in various fields.
 Finance: The investment fund required for the implementations of ETC’s short term and
long term plans come mainly from revenues generated by rendering various services.

According to the ETC, the average rural inhabitant of Ethiopia has to walk 30 kilometers to the
nearest phone. The ETC announced 7 September 2006 a program to improve national coverage,
and reduce the average distance to 5 kilometers. Since 2008 CDMA2000 and WCDMA is
available in certain areas.

Ethiopian telecom has launched the Fourth Generation (4G) Long-Term Evolution (LTE) service
on March 21, 2015 in line with the help of the Chinese company HUAWEI.

Ethio-Telecom Corporate Compunction Officer, Abdurahim Mohammed, stated that the rural
telecom access within 5 km radius service has currently reached 96 per cent. As part of the
efforts to expand its service and improve network quality, Ethio Telecom had built 725 stations
in Addis Ababa alone during the past 20 years, he said. Damages on fiber optic cables and power
interruptions are among the challenges the service provider faced in its expansion and network
quality improvement efforts, he said.

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Establishment of Ethio telecom

As a continuation of the 2005/06-2009/10 five-year plan and after concentrating its efforts on
education, health and agriculture, the Ethiopian government has decided to focus on the
improvement of telecommunication services, considering them as a key lever in the development
of Ethiopia, ethio telecom is born, on Monday 29th November 2010, from this ambition of
supporting the steady growth of our country, within the Growth Transformation Plan ), with
ambitious objectives for 2015.

The Ethiopian government has decided to transform the telecommunication infrastructure and
services to world class standard, considering them as a key lever in the development of Ethiopia.
Thus, ethio telecom is born from this ambition to bring about a paradigm shift in the
development of the telecom sector to support the steady growth of our country.

International connection links

Sut-1A is the largest satellite dish which has a radius of 32m and its direction is 335.5 Degree
East. This satellite earth station is built by a Japanese telecom equipment manufacturer NEC
(Nippon Electric Company) in collaboration with local engineers; it was officially launched to
carry traffic on September 9, 1979 E.C. The station positioned itself to the satellite owned and
operated by INTELSAT which was positioned to cover the Atlantic Ocean region. The satellite
station has a link capacity of 90.75X E1 which is equivalent to 2722.5 channels and it is used for
both voice and data. The second satellite link was built in 1985; it is a medium sized satellite
dish having a radius of 13m. This earth station which is also built by the Japanese based
company NEC has its direction at 60 Degree East and it has positioned itself to the satellite
owned and operated by INTELSAT and cover the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), the station links
the country with the Middle East and Far East countries. The earth station has a capacity of 0.5
E1 which is equivalent to 16 channels and is used to support voice services. The last digital
satellite dish is the smallest of all the three and has a radius of 7.3m. this satellite earth station is
built by SKY VISION and it has positioned to the satellite owned and operated by SKY VISION
itself and positioned to cover the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). This satellite is the latest and most
sophisticated of the other three and was launched in 2000 E.C. It has a capacity of 3X STM1
which is equivalent to 400/100 MB uplink/downlink for internet service.

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National Connection Links
So far, there are 661 fully automatic exchanges, as the high capacity exchanges are located in
Addis Ababa and larger cities of the country around 70% of the Public Switch Telephone
Network (PSTN) subscribers are located in Addis Ababa. To support the high bandwidth
requirement of the existing as well as the future telecom services of a high capacity optical fiber
(24 core) was installed from Addis Ababa to the main cities of the country in four different
routes, Addis Ababa – Jimma, Addis Ababa – Nekempt, Addis Ababa – Bahirdar – Gondar –
Metema and Addis Ababa –Dessie – Mekelle. The legacy fiber has a strength 2350 km. total
number of nods in all the four routes is 85 and from which 48 towns have a capacity of STM –
(155 MB) and the rest 37 towns have a capacity of STM – 16 (2.4 GB). Through the NGN
project carried which was carried out since 2000 E.C, the optical transmission network has been
upgraded and additional optical fiber has been installed; this makes the total strength of the
optical network to 10,256 km. the capacity was upgraded to 400 GB in September 2008 and the
total number of towns covered reached 186. The total length of optical fiber installed during the
Next Generation Network project is 7906 Km. There is a metropolitan ring network in the capital
with a capacity equivalent to the backbone optical transmission network and a total length of 69
Km.

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References
[1]. www.ethiotelecom.com
[2]. Worku Bogale, “A Background Paper on Telecom & Telecom Statistics in Ethiopia”,
February, 2005