Multi-Links Telkom Completes DWDM for Fibre Protection

In a determined move to optimise its services for better customer experience, Multi-Links Telkom has achieved a laudable milestone towards enabling network availability and enhancing superior customer experience with the completion of the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) project, which is designed to make its fibre optic network more robust for greater redundancies.

This will also provide a buffer to network down time resulting from fibre cuts.

A statement signed by Multi-Links Telkom’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Mrs. Ijeoma Abazie says the completion of the DWDM project “allows us to offer industry leading SLA’s with guaranteed uptime of three times reliability/redundancy.”

With the completion of the DWDM project and the cut over of SDH sites, customers now enjoy protection from prolonged downtime on account of fibre damage, Olurotimi Aborisade, Manager, Transmission Planning, Multi-Links Telkom said that the impact of fibre cuts are less noticeable and that DWDM project will significantly improve the quality of service delivery and will enable Multi-Links Telkom customers to enjoy high level of service availability with seamless switchover to redundant transmission paths, in spite of the fibre cuts. 

He noted that Multi-Links Telkom’s corporate customers on the leased line service and individual subscribers on the broad market platform will now enjoy more stability in network availability and industry benchmark SLA delivery for superior customer experience. This means that Multi-Links Telkom’s corporate clients would be empowered to more effectively manage their respective businesses.

Before now, corporate customers in Nigeria on leased line circuits often experience downtime as a result of the persistent fibre damages in respect of which the SDH network could offer little protection. However, the Multi-Links Telkom DWDM network has built in redundancy that allows traffic to be re-routed if fibre cut is experienced on a particular route because each route has been designed to carry two channels with the second channel serving as the alternative route when a cut happens on the first route.

This new initiative which is superior to the linear SDH facility on the network also has an enhanced capacity in terms of the volume of data and connection that it can offer Multi-Links Telkom’s corporate clients. Corporate clients can now deliver more offerings to their customers by the sheer size of the capacity embedded in the DWDM component which is of higher capacity to the linear SDH network.

Olurotimi Aborisade, who led the project team, said that the DWDM fibre ring is a robust facility that offers greater capacity and higher redundancy in terms of the flexibility of the network to provide alternative routing for traffic whenever downtime is experienced on the network on account of vandalisation or other service disruption.

Ben Machoga, Executive, Network Engineering  said that the DWDM network provides a greater platform for Multi-Links Telkom to offer better Service Level Agreement (SLA) with its corporate clients and thereby significantly improve revenue opportunity by blocking loopholes on the revenue channels.

With the expected network stability and availability resulting from the implementation of the DWDM project, Ben said Multi-Links Telkom would enjoy enhanced revenue growth “as our existing and potential customers can migrate their mission critical applications onto services offering much higher availability.”  He noted as well that with the DWDM network the technical team would have fewer challenges in micro managing the incidences of fibre damage which often result in network instability and commercial challenges regarding fulfilling customers’ expectations and satisfactions.

So far, major cities in Nigeria have already been covered in the DWDM deployment project. Cities presently covered by the DWDM ring include Lagos, Benin, Ibadan, Abuja, Jos, Bauchi, Kaduna, Kano, Zaria, Ife, Akure, Warri, Sapele, Aba, Umuahia, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Asaba, Markudi,  and Onitsha.