Main One to Land Submarine Cable From Portugal to Nigeria

By The Ghanaian Journal

Olayinka Latona
Main One Cable company last week announced that it has embarked on a submarine cable project, building an open access fibre optic transmission cable which will run from Portugal into the crest of west Africa, with initial landing in Nigeria and Ghana.

This project is to bridge the gap of Satellite network and to construct the most trusted, scalable and professionally managed international fibre optic network in Africa.

The project will provide telecommunication infrastructure that will enable cost effective access to global information. The company said that in order to face this challenges, it has arranged a 1.92 Terabits per second capacity cable system which will terminate in Seixal, Portugal where it will interconnect with other cable systems to London, New York and key cities in Asia. The cable will also span 14,000 kilometers with approximately 7,000 kilometers in the first phase between Lagos and Portugal.

Meanwhile, the chief executive officer of Main One Cable Mrs. Funke Opeke said, the cable will significantly expand internationally the internet capacity to West Africa by providing fifteen times the capacity available on the entire SAT3 system. Speaking further, she said, the service will provide adequate capacity which is more higher than the existing ones, double fast action services Internationally and believes that with all this effort being put in place Nigeria and west Africa will be launched into the information age with cost effective platform.

According to her, the effort will translate to fast access for business, e-government, education and other applications. The services are said to be targetd at existing communication operators and Internet service providers with the view of providing an infrastructure option that will not tie down their capital with long term savings for high quality international bandwidth.

The project according to Opeke would gulp about two hundred and fifty million dollars for the execution of the first phase.

Main One cable company signed a contract in April 2008 and subsequently awarded sub-marine cable last year in Nigeria and Ghana .The project which is in its six month out of the twenty- one months that is being schedule for it, is expected to start operation by the year 2010 in order to meet June 2010 which is the service date . Okepe also noted that by the time the project is fully in place, the cost of International bandwidth would be brought to levels that are globally competitive and provision of wholesale connectivity between Lagos or Accra cable station.