Background
Deregulation of the Telecommunication industry in Nigeria came with the usual problems of a multi-operator scenario, namely, physical interconnectivity and settlement of the accompanying charges. Interconnect Clearing House Nigeria (ICN) was licensed by the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) to provide and operate Interconnect Exchange Services throughout Nigeria. The principle of a clearing house is that as an independent third party, it is not in competition with the operators for subscribers and is focused on the twin issues of adequate interconnect capacity and prompt settlement of interconnect usage charges. ICN had grown rapidly and as a result of its success needed more switch capacity and greater flexibility.

When established, ICN, deployed cutting edge telecommunications technology of that time, namely a large SIEMENS EWSD, fully redundant TDM switch with a maximum system configuration capacity of 8064 E1”s.

However, it had become clear that as technology and the Nigerian market had evolved this needed to be upgraded.

The Problem
ICN faced 2 principal problems with their existing infrastructure: firstly, it could not keep pace with the industry’s migration to VoIP and secondly, it was a large monolithic switch located in Lagos whilst the business was increasingly distributed around the country.