Looking to reduce the costs of backhauling voice traffic in rural areas, Memotec, a subsidiary of Comtech EF Data (News - Alert) Corporation, has introduced a Local Switching solution for mobile operators in Africa.
A significant portion of voice calls may take place between villages in rural regions. The Memotec Local Switching solution routes the inter-village calls locally using the same BTS (or BTS clusters), avoiding the costs related to the upstream path, while standard mobile infrastructures would backhaul the voice circuits further up in the network. Also, to extend their rural offerings, thereby increasing revenue, mobile operators can take advantage of Local Switching, the company stated in a press release.
“Today, in rural areas, voice is still the predominant service, and backhaul costs are at a premium as they often rely on satellite links,” said Yves Hupe, president of Memotec. “Local Switching allows mobile operators to lower their OPEX (News - Alert) and provide attractive services suited to those areas, such as unlimited local calling plans. Local Switching also avoids double-hop routing, enhancing voice quality and reducing delays, driving up customer satisfaction.”
The Memotec Local Switching solution is compatible with all major GSM BTS/BSC vendors and does not require any BTS/BSC upgrades and is adaptable to all GSM networks and to any transmission system. The solution provides immediate and exceptional low cost of operation to mobile operators and is also available as a software upgrade to the Memotec CX-U Series RAN Optimization products already fielded.
In other news, Comtech Telecommunications (News 
- Alert) announced that its subsidiary,Comtech EF Data Corp., recently was selected to supply SATCOM products valued at $1.0 million for a European systems integrator.
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Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
