Service powered by blockchain on a network that has less growth pain
Service provider 3air and Swiss-owned K3 Telecom have got a $10 million contract to build new telecoms infrastructure in Ethiopia. After a memorandum of understanding was signed on February 17, 3air began planning K3’s network rollout in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. 3air, the ‘official partner’ of K3 Telecom, owns a SKALE network built on a fully Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) compatible blockchain system. K3 aims to expedite the project by shunning the tradition of laying underground cable.
Huge growth potential
Ethiopia had 115 million citizens at the last census in 2020, making it the second largest population in Africa after Nigeria. It is also the fastest growing economy on the continent, expanding by 6.1 per cent in the financial year 2019/20, according to the The World Bank. The joint project has huge scope as Ethiopia has ‘several highly populated cities that lack reliable broadband connectivity’, says a 3air release. The mission partners have estimated that they could potentially reach 3 million households and businesses across the nation. K3 Telecom has subsidiaries in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Don’t digit, rig it
K3 Telecom claims to have invented a Cable Through the Air service delivery model that, it claims, can install infrastructure within the 6 months. It saves time and money by avoiding the laborious underground cable laying model and covering 90 per cent of the capital city with radio signals. The Ethiopian government launched its digital transformation strategy in 2020 with the goal to digitise the growth and development for every citizen. 3air claims to be leading the change by providing digital identities, bankless payments and microloans to individuals and businesses. It clams its SKALE blockchain network can process ‘lightning-fast’ transactions.
Due credit to the unbanked
SKALE is an Ethereum-compatible network with a leaderless consensus designed to run on an uncapped number of independent nodes, each of which will be providing resources to multiple high performance decentralized blockchains. The SKALE protocol aims to allocate the optimum amount of resources to each node across the entire network of elastic blockchains.
Tectonic split
Landlocked in the Horn of Africa , Ethiopia covers a total area of 1,100,000 square kilometres (420,000 square miles) and and is the 12th-most populous country in the world. It is divided by the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates.