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Tayo Olanipekun
An industry pioneer in undersea communications technology, TE SubCom,today announced that it has secured a contract from MainOne to extend its active submarine cable system into West Africa’s francophone region.
The project will involve two additional branches connecting Dakar,Senegal and Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire.
These new branches will connect to MainOne’s 7,000km cable system, which extends from Portugal to Nigeria, and will inject new technology that upgrades the system to a potential capacity of 10TBps,according to a statement obtained by National Wire.
The subsea system will become operational by November 2019 and by then,this development will have brought MainOne’s landing points to five markets – Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cote D’Ivoire and Portugal, in addition to Cameroon.
A cluster of francophone countries in West Africa that are experiencing an increased demand for advanced telecom services including Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania will also benefit from these extensions into Cote D’Ivoire and Senegal,noted the statement.
MainOne said the move is a confirmation that it has continued to lead the digital transformation of the region by ushering in affordable connectivity to drive economic development.
“This extension of our subsea cable to Senegal and Cote D’Ivoire will further open up their international bandwidth markets, drive down costs and ultimately boost the economic and commercial development of the region,” MainOne’s Regional Executive for West Africa, Kazeem Oladepo,said.
Vice President, Project Management of TE SubCom Debbie Brask applauded The MainOne enhancements as bringing two additional connectivity options to “this rapidly growing region.”
“MainOne has also selected SubCom’s industry leading WSS ROADM technology to achieve dynamic capacity management in fulfilling the region’s burgeoning demand,” he added.
The MainOne Submarine Cable System links West Africa with Europe, bringing ultra-fast broadband in the region.
It runs from Seixal in Portugal to Lagos in Nigeria. The system first went live in July 2010, becoming the first privately-owned subsea cable to bring open-access broadband capacity in West Africa.
