Reference
A working glossary for telecom & ICT in Ethiopia.
Definitions of the terminology used across Zion Engineering's projects, insights and proposals — written for procurement teams, executives and engineers alike.
A–Z
The working terminology.
B
- BMS
- Building Management System — software and controllers that supervise HVAC, lighting, power and life-safety systems in a facility.
- BPO
- Business Process Outsourcing — delegating a business function such as a contact centre, claims processing or back-office operations to a specialist provider.
C
- Civil works
- The physical groundworks for a telecom site: foundations, fencing, access roads, earthing, cable trays and tower erection.
- Core network
- The central, packet-switched portion of a mobile or fixed operator's network that authenticates subscribers and routes traffic.
D
- Data centre
- A purpose-built facility that houses computing, storage and network equipment with conditioned power, cooling and security.
F
- Fiber backbone
- Long-haul optical fiber that interconnects an operator's regional aggregation nodes and core sites.
- FTTx
- Fiber-to-the-x — a family of last-mile fiber architectures (FTTH, FTTB, FTTC) that bring optical connectivity close to the end user.
M
- MEP
- Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing — the building services that keep a facility safe, comfortable and operational.
O
- OTDR
- Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer — the test instrument used to characterise fiber links and locate splice losses or breaks.
P
- PUE
- Power Usage Effectiveness — total facility energy divided by IT-equipment energy. The lower, the more efficient.
R
- RAN
- Radio Access Network — the radios, antennas and baseband units that connect mobile devices to the core network.
S
- SLA
- Service Level Agreement — a contractual commitment to availability, performance and response targets, with remedies on breach.
- Smart building
- A facility whose connectivity, security, energy and comfort systems are integrated and managed through a unified IP backbone.
T
- Tier-III
- Uptime Institute classification for a concurrently maintainable data centre with redundant capacity components and 99.982% availability target.
- Transport network
- The optical and microwave links that aggregate traffic between access sites, regional hubs and the core network.
V
- VAS
- Value-Added Services — non-voice services on a telecom network: messaging, content, subscription, RBT, USSD applications and similar.
- VISP
- Virtual Internet Service Provider — an ISP that delivers services to subscribers over another operator's underlying network.