The President of Medallion Communications Limited, Mr. Ikechukwu Nnamani was last week at the Titans of Tech Awards in Lagos crowned ‘Nigeria’s Telecom CEO of the Year 2019’, an award many stakeholders hailed, considering Nnamani’s contribution to the telecom industry since the liberalization in 2001.
Giving the award to Nnamani at the prestigious Oriental Hotel, the organizer of the awards, Technology Africa, described the founder of Medallion, a company fondly addresses as Nigeria’s
“We have voted Ikechukwu Nnamani as the ‘Telecom CEO of the Year 2019’ for his potentials in leading a company that has helped to transform the telecommunication industry with cutting edge solutions, that have a wider impact on financial services and other sectors of the Nigerian economy,” said Don Pedro Agambi, Coordinator of the Titans of Tech Awards.
The Titans of Tech Awards affirmed Nnamani’s prowess and expertise in the Nigeria’s telecom industry, which is today contributing 10.11 percent to the country Gross Domestic products as at the 1st quarter of 2019.
In the last few years, he has won several awards, which confirmed that winning the ‘Telecom CEO of the Year 2019’ is not a misnomer. Some of the awards Nnamani and Medallion have won include EPPAN’s ‘Person of the Year’ 2017, Best Africa Data Center Provider award, ICT Hub of the Year 2019 @ BOICT, 2018 Interconnectivty Company of the Year, ICT ClearingHouse of the year 2018, ‘Telecom Solutions Provider of the Year’ and ‘Data Center Provider of the Year’ and ‘Telecom Industry Personality of the Year’ award 2018.
The man, Nnamani
Engr. Ikechukwu Nnamani holds a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering degree from Tennessee State University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA as well as a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
With a core vision of bridging the digital divide between nations, he focuses on implementing the core network infrastructure that promotes, develops, and distributes local contents and ensuring high quality of service is delivered to the subscribers at an affordable price. With over 15 years of core telecom experience, Engr. Nnamani is very active in promoting forward looking industry policies for the growth of the telecom industry across Africa working with both regulators as well as operators to achieve this goal. He currently acts as an Executive of the premier telecoms body in Nigeria – the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) as well as the Nigerian Internet Registration Agency (Nira).
He has also promoted the establishment telecom infrastructure in several African countries, including Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Kenya, Uganda, and Angola amongst others.
Engr. Nnamani worked as an optical systems engineer at Luxcore Networks Inc., in Atlanta Georgia, USA. While at Luxcore, he helped design and manufactured Luxcore’s Semiconductor Waveguide Optical Regenerative Device. It is the world’s first integrated photonic wavelength converter chip. It guarantees non-blocking of traffic flow in telecommunication networks. Engr. Nnamani equally played a key role in the design and manufacture of Luxcore’s LambdaXchange.
The LambdaXchange is the world first demonstrated All Optical Router. The LambdaXchange won the best system award at the 2001 Optical Fiber Conference at Anaheim, California.
As a researcher at the Design Methodologies Laboratory, Tennessee State University, he was involved in the conceptual design of now patented Expanded Accommodation Tool used in the Joint Strike Force project by the United State Military.
The project was executed on behalf of Boeing Aerospace in St Louis, Missouri. He received numerous awards from Boeing Aerospace for his contribution to the success of the project. He also designed and successfully tested a prototype Trident II submarine umbilical retract mechanism used by the United States Navy, Strategic Ballistic Missiles Defense Program. Engr. Nnamani was awarded a United States Navy plaque for outstanding work on the project. His work has been published in numerous international publications including Boeing Aerospace newsletter, and the 2002 Region XI technical journal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) International.
Medallion Comunications Limited
Medallion has strived and carved out a niche in the Nigerian telecom industry as an authority in interconnect exchange clearinghouse services. It has carved out a niche in the Nigerian telecom industry as an authority in datacenter and interconnect exchange clearinghouse services.
Its Data Centre facility has over 83 local and international service providers hosted on it, making it the most connected Data Centre in Nigeria. Some of the service providers connected to the Medallion’s Data Centre include International gateway/submarine cables, GSM operators, CDMA/LTE operators, Fixed line/fixed wireless, long distance providers, metro fiber providers, ISPs, VAS and other content providers.
Medallion is currently hosting the site for the Nigerian Internet Registration Agency domain servers as well as a site for the Nigerian Internet Exchange Point. Several crucial infrastructure providers such as Google, Facebook, International Gateway Providers, etc are also hosted at Medallion. Medallion’s Data Center in Lagos is today rated the most interconnected facility in the West African sub-region.