Main One Cable to leverage broadband costs

A US$240 million project that involves the laying of 7,000 kilometres of submarine fiber optic cable between Seixal, a suburb of Lisbon Portugal, Accra and Lagos in Nigeria to unlock the constrained West African telecommunications market and catalyze the economic potential of the region arrived on the shores of Tema on Wednesday.

Powered by Main One Cable Company, a company owned by Main One Cable of Mauritius with a Pan African vision to build a private sector led and funded international telecommunications highway between Africa and the rest of the world via Portugal, the company is led by Ms. Funke Opeke, an experienced telecommunications executive who returned to Nigeria as Chief Technical Officer of MTN after a twenty-year career in the United States.

Announcing the completion of the first phase which links Portugal, Ghana and Nigeria with branching units in the Canary Islands, Morrocco, Senegal and Cote D’Ivoire,the Business Development Executive of Main One, Bernard Logan said the cable system will deliver 1.92tbps of high capacity bandwith equivalent to 10 times the available capacity of the existing fiber optic cable serving West Africa and more than 20 times the satellite capacity currently available across sub-Saharan Africa.

The 1.92Tbps of available bandwith will be leased wholesale to telecom operators and internet service providers on an open access basis, thereby encouraging competitive pricing and a large customer base.

Africa’s average monthly price for broadband is over three times higher than for Asia and almost six times higher than Europe if expressed as a per centage of gross national income per capita.

The African Finance Corporation (AFC), an African-led financial institution with a mission to improve African economies by developing and financing infrastructure and industrial and financial assets financed the project with the African Development Bank signing a loan agreement of USD61 million towards the development of the project.

Typically, better communication infrastructure reduces transportation time and costs and improves access to markets for inputs and outputs. Currently West Africa is served by 50 Gps from both satellites and cable. Main One capacity implies a dramatic bandwith increase of more than 1,000 per cent and a considerable reduction in cost.

Ms. Funke noted with the coming on-stream of Main One in the country, economies of scale will eventually reduce the cost to 10-20 per cent of current costs today of internet connectivity.

Source:B&FT