Internet and connectivity solutions company, Ecoband Networks Limited, has celebrated its 15th anniversary at its new corporate head office at Carlton House in Accra.
Guests of honour present at the event included Ato Sarpong, Deputy Minister of Communications, Estelle Akofio-Sowah, Country Manager of Google Ghana and Patrick Martens, Delegate of the (AHK Delegation of German Industry and Commerce in Ghana).
Also present were representatives of international partners of Ecoband such as Sonema from Monaco, Globecomm and Inmarsat from South Africa, SatADSL from Belgium, GillatSatcom from Israel and Signalhorn from Germany as well as numerous clients of Ecoband such as Leonora Dowley, Country Director of Varkey Foundation and representatives of the local banking community. The mood at the celebration was a happy one and it was marked by speeches, networking and well wishing, perhaps signifying the remarkable growth the company has achieved from its modest beginnings.
Alexander Sulzberger, CEO of Ecoband, and Eric Gbeho, Chief Operating Officer of the company, took GB&F through the genesis of the company. Ecoband started with Sulzberger and Gbeho as partners in 2001. Operating out of a small apartment as agents selling Internet backbone connectivity via satellite to ISP clients, Ecoband is a testament to the giant strides they have made in the past 15 years. “I do remember when my partner and I started out using his apartment as an office and my car to get around … and then we moved into Busyinternet [at the time the largest Internet Café with an incubator space for start-up companies which rented small office spaces], then into this building here, Carlton House and eventually acquiring two floors in the building. So it has been a steady progression for us,” he recounted.
The story of Ecoband mirrors the growth story of the telecommunications sector in Ghana. These were the days of VSAT providing Internet connectivity to submarine cables and fibre optic networks. Gbeho added: “When we first came into the business, we were just agents selling VSAT but I guess because of our good services, a lot of our clients demanded additional services and so were forced into becoming an ISP just to satisfy those demands and it has been one step after the other right till we have gotten here.” Sulzberger agreed: “It hasn’t been easy doing business in the communications sector in Ghana. My partner Eric and I founded the company in 2001. Then there wasn’t any submarine fibre-optic cable connecting Ghana to the rest of the world. So our core business was delivering satellite capacity to ISPs, telcos and large Internet cafes like Busyinternet, which was one of our first customers. When we started, the ISP sector was relatively small, with about five or six players on the market. Today, we have more than 20 companies delivering Internet service, including the 3G and 4G operators.”
Comprehensive and flexible satellite
Today, Ecoband offers comprehensive and flexible satellite, microwave and fibre-optic based solutions for Internet backbone connectivity as well as broadband wireless services. The company had to adapt to the changing dynamics of the telecommunications sector in the country, a strategy which has paid off in making it one of the most reputable operators in the industry. “After developing the ISP market here in Ghana, we went to Togo and Benin, and to some extent, in Ivory Coast and sold DVB and SCPC satellite solutions to telcos and ISPs in these countries. But in 2005 when the first submarine cable, Sat3, landed in Ghana and was managed by Ghana Telecom, the whole satellite and Internet market drastically changed. So we applied for a licence to become a proper Ghanaian ISP and no longer the reseller of other international operators’ services. We bought capacity on Sat3 and later the MainOne cable and from Globacom’s GLO 1 [operators of the GLO mobile network]. Today, we have relationships with West Africa Submarine Cable (WACS) and ACE, the newest cable, to enable us have a full redundancy for our network between Accra and London,” Sulzberger explained.
Ghana’s telecommunications sector is one of the most competitive in Africa. It has moved on from slow download speeds to the latest in fourth generation Internet access, 4G LTE. Though Ecoband has adapted to the needs of the market, the CEO said Ecoband would not go 4G. “Now we have a lot of players in the market, including smaller ISPs like us; telcos like Vodafone and MTN with 3G and 4G networks, and also recently Surfline and Busy 4G for mass market.” He stated: “Our approach is a bit different; we are focusing on high end corporate clients such as banks like SocietéGénérale Ghana where we manage all the branches nationwide on radio, fibre and satellite, and also insurance companies like Allianz, for example. So we are one of the few providers in Ghana today that has different media for delivery of Internet connectivity solutions. Still we do a lot of satellite for rural areas. We have fibre optic networks we partly own and partly lease from third parties. We have recently partnered with Google’s ‘Project Link’ in Accra, Tema and Kumasi to use their metro-fibre network to connect to our customers with high speed fibre-optic links.”
The remarkable growth of Ecoband as an ISP is evident in its impressive roster of clients. These include the top two biggest commercial banks in Ghana – Ecobank and Ghana Commercial Bank – plus other top 10 ones, including Fidelity Bank; Allianz, and a host of other top-notch corporate giants like KPMG, Kinross Mining, GCnet, AITI-KACE, among others. The company has also opened a second office in Kumasi, Ghana’s second biggest city, and has operations in a few West African countries.
Improving education with technology
One of the key projects Ecoband has been engaged in lately is in improving educational, using satellite. Gbeho said the education sector would be key to the company’s plans. “We are doing a lot more in the educational field, with an NGO called the Varkey Foundation. They are undertaking a project in the educational sector. We have been running it for them as a pilot programme, with remote 40 sites this school year and it has come on very successfully. We like to encourage that,” said Gbeho. Sulzberger concurred: “It has been very successful. There is funding available from European donors, and the European Space Agency is co-funding some of the equipment that allows roll-out to more schools and improve the quality of education in rural Ghana.”
School train for tomorrow
Dowley explained: “The foundation runs a teacher training project [called School Train for Tomorrow] and we’ve partnered with SatADSL and Ecoband which are providing us with connectivity. We’ve built a studio in Accra where we have Ghana Education Service (GES) teachers who offer teacher training. The teachers in rural areas in the Eastern Region are connected via satellite connectivity. That means we are able to broadcast live interactive two-way training to those teachers so that they can see our trainers, they can ask questions and vice-versa.”
“The reason we are doing it is that the Varkey Foundation is an education foundation that is committed to improving the quality of education for children all over the world and we think the best way to do it is to target teachers because teachers teach lots of children. We came to Ghana because we saw that there was an appetite for development. There were already a lot of people working in the connectivity space, but also because in Ghana too we knew there was a lack of trained teachers. There was lots of work to be done but the environment was ready for us to do,” she disclosed.
Dowley said the impact on educational improvement has been commendable. “We are training 5,000 teachers with only two trainers and we are already having a huge impact with only a small number of trainers which is really great. What we assume which is backed by research is that if you improve the quality of teachers, you improve learning outcomes for students. Our project is been valuated externally and we’ve seen in our system through the evaluation system that the teachers who are partially trained under our project are changing their classroom practices. They are becoming better teachers and having an impact on about 90,000 students. That is just two trainers. It is because we are able to connect to so many different schools at one go. We are moving away from the traditional model of face-to-face training and we are training via satellite.”
Corporate social responsibility
Aside the good work it is doing with teacher training and educational improvement, Gbeho said there are other ways Ecoband is giving back to society. “In terms of our staffing too, in education, we rely a lot on the KNUST [a technology-oriented university in Kumasi]. We have a programme with them where every year we take a couple of their students who are about to graduate and give them work experience. It helps them when they go to look for employment somewhere else. We do keep some of them to help with our expansion. Last year, we were able to open up the Kumasi office using two of their graduates. So we feel it is a way that we can also give back, but like I said, education is a field that we really want to pioneer.”
Ecoband has had its challenges. Expected, a developing economy like Ghana is now leveraging on technology. “One of our main challenges was the power crisis. Because all telecommunications rely on electricity, we had to invest considerably in battery back-up banks for our base stations in order to guarantee the uptime requirements of our customers. The licence fees charged by the regulator are costly. Although the fees have reduced a little bit, they are still on the high side. He went on: “Additionally, frequency spectrum is also quite expensive and licences for satellite were a bit cost prohibitive. The regulator has been active in finding solutions to ease the financial burden. Cost of access to finance is another issue for us. If you want to borrow money in Ghana, the interest rates are sky high, so what we have done in the past is to reinvest our profits in order for us to grow but you can only go so far going this route.”
According to Sulzberger, “We see the growth in two areas. One is more service on terrestrial fibre because companies require more capacity which is difficult to deliver over wireless solutions. Therefore, partnering with Ghanaian telecom companies that have built cross-country fibre and with Google Project Link which have entered the Ghanaian market as a metro-fibre operator helps us to reach these customers with fibre optics services.” He stressed: “The second area is the increasing demand in the rural areas for Internet and telecom services. Indeed the telcos and big mobile operators have networks in almost all Ghanaian districts but their Internet service in rural areas is not the most reliable, and is also expensive. So what we are looking at starting in 2017 is to work with new satellite operators, using Ka-Band VSAT technology, which is a newer development. This allows us to use a smaller antennas and less costly equipment to deploy in rural areas. This kind of technology, combined with WiFi hotspots, will allow us to offer faster and more affordable Internet in rural areas,” Sulzberger revealed.
Solidarity messages from partners
The event had in attendance some of the company’s international partners, and they shared their solidarity messages.
Michel Dothey – SatADSL (Belgium)
“We are a satellite provider in Brussels. We provide satellite connectivity all over Africa. We have partners everywhere in Africa and in Ghana we’ve had partnership with Ecoband for abouet five years now, and the most important project we have together is the Varkey Foundation project. We also have some projects together connecting banks, linking their remote branches because satellite services are complementary to terrestrial connectivity. Ecoband is able to provide both, and it is providing fibre connectivity in the cities, but in the rural areas, satellite is best, and this is what we provide. We provide the service and Ecoband does all the installation and first level support.”
“Next year, the pilot project we have with 40 schools will be expanded into 500 schools in Ghana. With satellite, and then 500 schools, will mean training 60,000 teachers, and because each teacher handles about 30 students, the project will impact 1.5 million students in total. This will have a real impact as education is the most important factor for the future of Ghana.”
Yves Du Sault – Sonema (Monaco)
“Our partnership with Ecoband started around nine years ago. Sonema is in about 43 countries in Africa and wherever we have entered, VSAT satellite services are provided in those countries. To provide the highest quality of service, we partner with local companies. Those local companies are selected based on a number of criteria. We do due diligence on them and train them on our technology and our procedures. Ecoband, from the word go, is one of the best partners that we have had. The relationship started as a technical partnership and in parallel Alex [Sulzberger] and his colleagues have built Ecoband as a commercial, technical company providing satellite and terrestrial infrastructure services. In the last couple of years, it has not only been our successful technical partner in a country where the fibre-optic network is pretty good, the satellite just plays a complementary role to the fibre. Ecoband is the preferred choice for different reasons. Alex and his team have built a superior network compared to that of other countries, the level of quality they have on their terrestrial infrastructure services makes their approach much better for us.”
VladaKrasojevic – Signalhorn Trusted Networks (Germany)
“Our partnership with Ecoband has worked well just because we are two skilled companies which have values to add to each other. For instance, Signalhorn itself is one of the strongest companies in the world for the design and delivery of independent private networks with over 1,800 active sites currently in 130 countries worldwide. We couldn’t do anything if there wasn’t Ecoband on the ground; Ecoband knew how to install and transform from design into reality our projects and that was basically the secret. Each of us knew perfectly each other’s strength in the relationship. We trust each other, we found complementary values to put together. We have worked over 10 years together and now we are discussing in order re-invigorate actions between us and conquer more space and projects together in the Ghanaian market.”
Susanne Neubert – Globecomm (South Africa)
“It’s been very easy sailing and one of the reasons is that Alexander and I are both German and so the understanding between each other is very good and also because Ghanaians are extremely friendly and thorough, which I appreciate. We have only been working with one another for about a year but we can definitely see the gaps that the remaining satellite industry cannot fill and how we can fill them in Ghana. One of the key growth markets for us is most likely the finance industry and together with Ecoband we hope to grow in this area in Ghana.”
AsafRosenheck – GilatSatcom (Israel)
“Ecoband has been our loyal and trusted customer for more than 10 years I will say. They are always there for us and we are there for them. They supported us in a good way and we have had a great experience with them. “We owe them a great deal for our business in Ghana and because of the good relationship we had with Alex [Sulzberger] and Eric [Gbeho], we have managed to grow our business in Ghana and this is why we will always be grateful to them.”
By Anthony Sedzro, GB&F
