In a bid to revolutionize how traffic is exchanged between African member countries, the Smart Africa Alliance (SAA) launched the One Africa Network (OAN), an initiative aiming to establish a unified African telecommunications framework that would lower intra-regional communication costs and eliminate roaming costs, thus boosting intra-African traffic, trade and economic growth, as well as development.
In order to speed up the implementation of the OAN, and to enhance its benefits, the SAA launched yet another initiative called Open Waves, based on the delivery of an African Regional Traffic Exchange and Financial settlements platform (ARTEF), the purpose of which install a state of the art telephony platform to process millions of calls per minute, to facilitate quality of service keeping call flows with African borders, prevent fraud, and ensure free roaming within Africa.
The ARTEF network design and implementation has been entrusted to Global Voice Group S.A. (GVG), a leading provider of IT-based telecom governance solutions, after the SAA and the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding on 9 February of this year.
GVG, a premier partner in revenue assurance and tax compliance platforms, already enjoys a strong presence in Africa with a 20 year track record of technology partnerships, having successfully assisted several African governments in addressing the increasing problems of tax compliance, revenue leakage and overall governance issues in their respective liberalized telecommunications market.
As per the SAA's requirements, the solution proposed by GVG will enable all stakeholders in the OAN (governments of member countries, operators and consumers) to reap the rewards of improved regulatory oversight, revenue assurance and enhanced quality of service and security. In addition to delivering the above-mentioned benefits, this shared infrastructure was designed to enable the creation of a simple, unified, user-friendly environment that is favorable to data sharing and collaboration at the regional level.