In 2004, GreenNet was commissioned by the ‘Catalysing Access to ICTs in Africa’ project (component 1a), to design a technical solution for a telecoms licensing ‘One Stop Shop’ – basically everything you ever wanted to know about telecommunications regulations and licenses across Africa under one roof. We designed the system with a distributed database built on ActionApps, which comprises 64 independent nodes. It streamlines the process of gathering up-to-date information from each national regulator, and publishing it for satellite service providers, license applicants and researchers in a single location. So far we have handed over about 30 installations to individual regulators and taught them how to use the system in a series of workshops in Western and Southern Africa. The data gathered in each region can be viewed on the West and Southern regional sites.
