The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) held a workshop on ‘Satellite Communications’ for all African English speaking countries from 18th-22nd October 2010 at the Faculty of Computing and IT (CIT).

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) held a workshop on ‘Satellite Communications’ for all African English speaking countries from 18th-22nd October 2010 at the Faculty of Computing and IT (CIT).

The workshop was held under the ITU supported Center of Excellence (CoE) at Makerere University.

The workshop was aimed at helping VSAT operators, Telecom technicians and engineers come up to speed with the most technical concepts and practices. This is part of a recent capacity building partnership entered between the ITU and International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation (ITSO) for the delivery of satellite communication training, under the auspices of the Centers of Excellence network for Africa.

The workshop covered a wide range of issues relating to satellite communications and regulatory issues, including the role of the regional and internal satellite communications organizations. The workshop addressed topics on: Satellite systems design and technology; Earth stations technology; Transmission and network planning; Link budget analysis and design; VSAT installation and maintenance; Audit of VSAT maintenance; regulatory factors: licensing, orbital slot registration and ownership, frequency registration, intersystem coordination; and Earth station and VSAT registration –best practices, WiMAX and other terrestrial interface issues.

Andreas Spoormaker, Director Customer Solutions Engineering-Intelsat Africa and an ITSO expert with extensive experience in satellite communications together with Eric Niameogo a VSAT expert, facilitated the training and took participants through sessions Satellite Network Dimensioning and Interference Initiatives.

Speaking about the 5-day training, Dr. Idris Rai, who is the ITU Center of Excellence Manager at Makerere University, noted the significant skills gained by the participants who attended the training from as far as Ghana, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and South Africa in addition to a host of participants from all local telecom operators. In particular, he stressed the importance and relevance of the ITU CoE in building capacity in telecom related disciplines in conjunction with ITU. For the first phase of three years, ITU supports the Center of Excellence in terms of identifying and funding experts in various Telecommunications disciplines.

There are six ITU CoE in Africa that were established last year through a very competitive bidding process. Two centers are located in West Africa, one in Central Africa, two in Eastern Africa, and one is a virtual CoE that delivers training through distance learning platforms. Other workshops that have been conducted at Makerere’s CoE include Customer Service Management, and the next workshop due to take place early next year, will be announced shortly.

Downloads

Training schedule MS Word version, PDF version

Preface to ITSO-ITU Courses

Andreas Spoormaker: Satellite Network Dimensioning presentation

Andreas Spoormaker: Interference Initiatives presentation

mwamai@admin.mak.ac.ug, Public Relations Office