Posted on 15.07.2022 at 10:20 a.m. by Nana Kamsukom

The Chinese company ZTE presented to the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Minette Libom Li Likeng, on July 13 in Yaoundé, the National Emergency Telecommunications Network, which it has just built on behalf of the State.

This network, we learned, will manage the country’s secure communications. To do this, it is made up of a National Emergency Operations Center in Yaoundé (heart of the network), its reinforcement in Douala and eight Regional Operations Centers in the main towns of the regions of Cameroon.

In detail, ZTE built a five-component infrastructure. The first is the trunked radio network. This allows government teams to handle emergencies confidentially and securely without the need for a public network.

The second element is the emergency communication system. It is designed to handle distress calls from any subscriber with a mobile terminal with or without a chip.

The third part of the RTNU is the CCTV system. This involves ensuring the protection of property and people by conveying, recording and using the images taken by a set of cameras. These cameras, used to record incident video, enable large-scale indoor and outdoor surveillance applications: river, forest, airport, station, port, oil field, square, park, landscape, school, street, prison, large hall sports and warehouse, etc…

CCTV cameras are installed in all the regional capitals of Cameroon with display, supervision and data processing screens housed in the emergency telecommunications centres.

The fourth component manages videoconferencing. This is a technology that allows you to communicate with a remote party from a microcomputer and to see him in real time in a virtual window on the screen. It allows participants, spread over several remote sites, to communicate while benefiting from sound, image and any other type of data transmission.

The final element is the electronic policing system. It is a centralized security operations management technology platform. The main services offered are: police information management, criminal information management, criminal case management, wanted persons management, system management portal, police capacity building. For the moment, the sites hosting these infrastructures are those of the national gendarmerie.

The establishment of the UNRT follows the visit of the President of the Republic, Paul Biya, to China in July 2011, with a view to responding to disasters and other emergency situations by setting up a adequate communication for an effective early warning system. Following this visit, a commercial contract will be signed on December 21, 2012 with ZTE.

The related financing agreement, for a partial amount of 77.7 billion FCFA, was signed on October 29, 2013, between the Ministry in charge of the Economy and the Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank -China). The signing, on January 5, 2017, of the construction contract with the Chinese company ZTE confirms the effective start of the work. But so far, those responsible for the project have not revealed the final cost of this infrastructure.