This week has seen me assigned to return to South East Africa, to continue the WAN implementation work we’ve been undertaking in partnership with Malawi Police Service, Police Scotland, Scottish Government and the Lord Provost’s Malawi Fund.
To date, Malawi Police Service has had a limited ICT capability due to the lack of a network to connect their stations up. This has now changed, with the launch of MPS’ WAN in the Southern and Eastern regions of the country. Desktop PC’s donated, are being connected to a combination of D-Link, Cisco and Ubiquiti infrastructure, before the Electrical Supply Corporation of Malawi (ESCOM), connect all the sites back to the Police Service’s HQ in the capital, Lilongwe via their fibre infrastructure. This is realising site-to-site speeds of 1Gbps. Finally the Governments GWAN (Government Wide Area Network) is providing breakout to the internet, for a full solution that will empower and enable Malawi Police Service to improve services to the countries population.
This visit has seen me visit Lilongwe, Blantyre and a town I’ve never visited before, Nsanje to inspect the MPS WAN implementation. Nsanje is the countries southernmost town and is only a few hundred metres from the border with Mozambique, over the Shire River. Even this far from Lilongwe, the installed infrastructure is able to support 1Gbps throughput, and latency measuring around 9-10ms.
The conclusion of this visit, will see funding secured to commence phase two of the project, to connect the stations in the Central and Northern regions of the country, transforming the capabilities of the Malawi Police Service.
