Since the acquisition of Link Africa, which completed in June last year, Gateway has seamlessly integrated Link Africa’s customers, network infrastructure and systems and has terminated over one billion conversation minutes for carriers, multinationals and enterprises throughout the continent.

New customers choosing to use Gateway since the acquisition include Vodacom, Madagascar’s Madacom, Celtel, and operators in markets such as Kenya, Chad, Zambia, South Africa and the Seychelles. Telia Sonera, Sprint, Qwest and Neuf Telecom are all European customers who have extended their connectivity into Africa through Gateway since the acquisition. Gateway has expanded its reach to over 30 African markets, serving over 200 fixed line and mobile telephone companies and 3000 corporations as at December 2005.

And the first of our feature articles takes you through the commercial, technical and political maze surrounding intercontinental sending and receiving of calls. We tell you, also, how critical our managed satellite networking service has become for many of our customers.

In this first edition of 2006, we have the first of our “Inside Gateway” features, offering an unusual perspective on what goes into a Gateway solution.

In a continent as vast and diverse as Africa, connectivity requires specialized and innovative thinking that creates opportunities for all Africa to talk. Long may we listen!


Peter Gbedemah
Managing Director
Gateway Communications

Peter Gbedemah has been encouraged to build more, to achieve his vision of connectivity for all in Africa. Of the future for Gateway, and its contribution to African connectivity, he spoke of a sweeping project, of utilising next generation technology to build a pan-African network through distributed architecture and meshed connectivity.

“If you make a call from Lagos to Accra, it is going to go via London. If you make a call from Senegal to Gabon, it is going to go via Paris. If you make a call from DRC to Congo-B, it is going to go via Belgium. The Gateway vision is this: the dollars for Africa stay in Africa. The way that we look at the world is this: if a call is made from Congo-B to the DRC, the dollars generated by that call should go to the Congolese.” Peter Gbedemah confirmed, then, that Gateway is working, already, with certain pan-African partnerships it has established through its satellite operations. “We run an IP network,” he said. “It is very simple for us to facilitate those kinds of traffic flows.”

Gateway is unique in Africa, because it can provide this support for infrastructure whilst enabling revenue growth within the continent. Mr Gbedemah elaborated on the importance of this vision of African satellite provision of IP connectivity and services.

“This is important in Africa, for a couple of reasons,” he said. “It is important because the infrastructure is diverse and fragmented. It is important because you are not just keeping the dollars in Africa, but you are building a network of reliable communications. This is what is necessary. This is what Gateway is all about.”

The resource available to customers has expanded significantly with Gateway investing further millions of dollars in systems and infrastructure for African operators. Over the past eight months, Gateway's employee base has grown 45% as the Group has integrated Link Africa businesses to create a combined team with unmatched experience in connectivity in Africa. Gateway now has offices in London, Johannesburg, Geneva, Cape Town and Brussels from which it manages it's many valued customer relationships.

Peter Gbedemah, CEO of Gateway Communications commented:

"The response we have had from the African market and our global customers from the acquisition has been overwhelming. Our focus and energy over the past eight months has been to successfully and seamlessly integrate the businesses with maximum benefit delivered to our customers in terms of the African expertise, scale and reach of our business."

Our first ever Employee of the Month is Wim Vandendoorent. Wim works in the Gateway Switching Team in Belgium, as a second line support engineer.

Belgium’s telecommunications infrastructure is highly developed, technologically advanced, and completely automated – a perfect environment for developing knowledge of systems that support domestic and international telephony. Following his work for AEG, Wim developed more experience working for Belgacom as a systems engineer, moving from small PBX equipment to more complex duplex communication systems. He gained more experience, and more knowledge, as Belgacom extended its reach across Europe and into IP telephony.

Wim’s career, working with systems for telecommunications, opened his eyes to the potential of VoIP technologies. It was when Wim moved to LinkAfrica, which employed technologies developed by Veraz, that he was able to appreciate more fully the ways in which such technology could deliver real connectivity around the world.

“Veraz supplies one of the best systems I have seen,” says Wim. "And Gateway use it in a very special way which is unique in Africa."

When Gateway bought LinkAfrica last year, the company was able to utilize Veraz technology, which is perfectly suited to meet the requirements of GSM and network operators in Africa, to develop further a pan-African network through distributed architecture and a meshed connectivity, delivering the highest possible quality in voice over packet networks.

From Belgium, Gateway manages over 600 different satellite links and over a hundred different earth stations in Africa. In Belgium, Wim and his fellow engineers make it possible to support comprehensive international network service provision in more than 30 African countries, enabling services to over 50 African telephone networks, supporting over 60 million subscribers, connecting African users to global communications networks through interconnections with over 200 networks.