Lhe date of April 5, 1972 remains engraved forever in the memory of Alassane Dialy Ndiaye, 79 years old today. That day, this telecommunications engineer presses a button that will allow a conversation that has remained famous: “Mr. President, good evening, Senghor on the phone. I send you sunshine from Senegal”, these are the words held live by the Senegalese president at the time, Léopold Sédar Senghor to his counterpart at the Élysée, Georges Pompidou, from Gandoul near Sebikotane, in the region of Thiès about fifty kilometers from Dakar, the capital of Senegal.
The culmination of long months of work and sleepless nights for Alassane Dialy Ndiaye and his teams. In the spring of 1972, they had achieved the feat of commissioning the first satellite telecommunications earth station in West Africa. You have to imagine a gigantic 32-meter parabolic antenna that has made it possible to connect Senegal and Africa to the rest of the world. Installed in a particularly favorable area – equidistant between two plateaus – to better capture the sun’s rays, the Gandoul station has ushered Senegal and West Africa into a new era where a great global battle was already being played out around telecommunications.
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Bringing Senegal into a new era of telecommunications
“Working in synergy with a team of Senegalese technicians allowed us to understand that we were just as capable as the others of assimilating technology of great complexity, savors Alassane Dialy Ndiaye, both moved and carried. by the recognition of the audience present for this anniversary ceremony. “I am proud to have been at the heart of this somewhat crazy project,” confides the man who was the first African to specialize in space telecommunications and who headed TéléSénégal, the ancestor of Sonatel. At that time, thanks to this innovation, and many others that would follow, Gandoul quickly became the obligatory passage for dozens of African telecom technicians and engineers. “It was at this time that I noticed that together we could do great things, remembers Alassane Dialy Ndiaye. At the first meetings I attended at Intelsat, he continues, compiling his memories, I was the only black person at first, but then there were many of us, he points out. Contrary to popular belief, the role that Africa plays in the world is very important”, insists the man who had the mission to convince President Senghor to bring the country of Teranga into the era of modern telecommunications. “Even if he did not master telecommunications, the president encouraged this avant-garde project because he knew that the future of Africa would go through this type of technical development”, recalls Alassane Dialy Ndiaye. .
This changeover, the Senegalese, in particular the inhabitants of Dakar and its region, experienced it immediately with the retransmission on national television of the Olympic Games in Munich. And the national daily, The sun, to headline the front page: “A new Olympic sport in Dakar: getting to watch TV”. From the 1980s, in the context of the conquest of space, Gandoul distinguished herself by participating in NASA programs, such as the launch of the space shuttle Columbia. “Our role was to defend Africa’s place with Eutelsat, adds Alassane Dialy Ndiaye, applauded like a rock star a few hours earlier, during a ceremony organized by the Sonatel group (27% owned by the Senegalese State and 43% by Orange) in Gandoul, Tuesday May 17.
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Dust off the satellite image
Fifty years later, Senegal has only strengthened its place as a hub in the field of telecommunications on the African continent. “It may seem counter-intuitive with the advent of mobile, but the satellite is more than ever a technology of the future in this 21st century.e century, it is the subject of multiple innovations that will connect our populations, including in little or poorly served areas”, wants to believe Sékou Dramé, the general manager of Sonatel, while the Gandoul station is in full transformation, and since February has hosted the European Satellite Company (SES), the world’s leading provider of satellite telecommunications services. New dishes will be connected to a constellation of satellites called “in medium orbit O3b mPower” of the Luxembourg operator SES, by the end of 2022.
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Dakar, gateway to international connectivity in Africa
Gandoul will therefore be reborn, but there is no question of making it an isolated project far from the concerns of the Senegalese. The transformation of the site is part of a more ambitious project by Sonatel and Orange, its largest shareholder. “There is a complementarity between the submarine cables and the terrestrial infrastructure and then the satellite”, supports Jean-Luc Vuillemin, director of the international networks of Orange. The new satellites will in turn be connected to the existing terrestrial telecom networks and those being extended, i.e. to fiber optics as well as to the submarine cables which already link Senegal to France and Portugal. “These infrastructures are vital for telecommunications. And countries like Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Morocco are starting to mesh their territory, because they need to be connected to the rest of the world,” explains Jérôme Barré, CEO of Orange Wholesale and international networks. The stakes are high, because it is also a question of avoiding a digital divide in African countries, because there is a very great appetite among users for data,” points out the expert. on assignment in Dakar. Exactly, Senegal is rather well covered in 2G, 3G and 4G. 90% of the population already has access to 4G. With its access to the sea, Dakar is a real gateway to Africa for the French group, which holds more than 50% of the telecommunications market there, and has set up the headquarters of its Djoliba land network there, which will connect the Gandoul station and “you now have this opening to space with SES and the satellites”, adds Jérôme Barré. “Today, mobile phones are used for so many things, such as money transfers, to access streaming content, music… list the expert for whom the risks of congestion must be avoided at the local level .
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Battle for local coverage
The group invests up to one billion euros each year for the development of network infrastructures in Africa. Illustration at Orange International Networks, Infrastructures & Services (Oinis), right in the center of Dakar, the experts of Djoliba (from the Mandinka name of the Niger River), the first “pan-African” land network of optical fibers built by Orange and which already connects eight West African countries (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal) know his subjects by heart. This Monday morning in May, Aminata Dramé at the head of the structure and her teams discuss in front of the main screens the accidents which have taken place in the previous days, referring to the repeaters. “Djoliba was really expected, the proof, after a year, we are already talking about extension”, adds Aminata Dramé who underlines the advantage for customers of having only one contact for all their needs. “We are rather aiming for an extension of coverage towards the north, so countries like Mauritania, in the long term we could go up to Morocco, to the coast in North Africa, this is the axis that seems to us the most interesting today to develop”, specifies Jean-Luc Vuillemin, bridgehead of this project and many others on the continent. In terms of prices, Jérôme Barré cites the case of landlocked countries such as Mali, which is already benefiting from lower prices on international connectivity. While Orange is betting on this promising future, Senegalese consumers are hoping that all these projects will promote better quality of speed and more attractive prices.
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