By Prince Osuagwu

MTN Nigeria, last week, entered the submarine cable competition going on in Nigeria today, joining ten other countries of the world in an agreement that would usher in West African Cable Systems, WACS.

The new turn in submarine cable system in Nigeria was sparked off by Second National Operator Globacom and another telecommunications company MainOne which both initiated submarine cable projects connecting Europe to Africa and subsequently landed them in Lagos, Nigeria and Ghana recently.
Being a very major player in Nigeria and indeed African telecom market, MTN perhaps felt it could not be in the back waters of the submarine cable revolution, and joined to make up the WACS team.

West African Cable System is a high capacity submarine cable system linking Europe, West Africa  and South Africa with over 3.8 Tbps.
WACS has a consortium of 11 Operators from 9 Countries, including MTN, Portugal Telecom, Tata/Neotel, Telkom, Broadband Infraco, Vodacom, among others. It has an operator led and funding investment model, with a primary incentive to lower costs and improve in-country services.
MTN said that WACS operates an Open Access Policy  to all operators, including competitive Telcos without restrictions even as prices of bandwidth when in operation would be determined by the consortium and not an individual member.

MTN also revealed that the Nigeria cable landing station would be built, developed, operated and managed by MTN Nigeria.
Announcing the development to a select ICT reporters, in Lagos recently, MTN’s Corporate Services Executive, Mr Wale Goodluck, revealed that MTN would commence commercial operation on the WACS platform by December 2010.
Goodluck said MTN  was driven by the realisation that Nigeria’s significance in the world today is increasing by the day as it was emerging a major emerging market and communication hub in Africa.

For him, MTN has studied the growing International trade, Business and Relationships and examined the central role of communication technology as a major enabler in these relationships. He said that as the bandwidth intensive data services and business solutions are growing in Nigeria, there was need for reliable and affordable Communication Services.
All these, he noted, called for Good quality infrastructure and capacity robust complementary cable systems, which will offer value to consumers as well as suppliers by decreasing international bandwidth prices.
WACS, according to Goodluck, would increase  consumer access to international bandwidth driven products, improve redundancy and diversity and thereby protect National Security interests.

The initiative would also reduce consumers susceptibility to physical cuts and damage on one system, creating opportunities for cable infrastructure share initiatives, and directly enhance each individual cable providers systemic reliability.