By Emmanuel Elebeke

Premier private submarine network cable company in West Africa, Main One cables has announced Cisco’s “Internet Protocol Next- Generation Network” (IP-NGN) as its choice solution to take its broadband capacity in West Africa to the next level.

The platform according to the company will provide a strong foundation for meeting Main One’s present and future business services requirements.

With the choice of CISCO IP-NGN, the company said that it hopes to witness high capacity, resiliency, and Robust Ipv6 Support in the broadband services across the West African sub-region..

Main One CEO, Funke Opeke said demand for highly secure, high bandwidth network capacity from government and global enterprise customers is driving Main One to deploy its new network. Working with Cisco under this new partnership, Opeke said that Main One will develop a high quality IP based network and application service offerings to create efficient content delivery highway to private and public communications networks in West Africa.

With the new partnership, she added that customers will benefit from various value-added services enabled by the CISCO IP technology such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Voice Over IP (VOIP), IPTV and advanced collaboration technologies.

Also, the Main One network, according to her will provide its customers the flexibility of being able to purchase bandwidth in smaller increments and further enable broadband penetration within the region.

She stated that the integral to meeting these customer requirements will be the deployment of the Cisco CRS-3 and ASR 9000 series routers for enhanced capacity, high resiliency, and robust IPv6 support.

It will be recalled that in July 2010, Main One switched on its 1,920 Gbps, 7,000 kilometers long, submarine fiber optic cable system, linking West Africa to Europe. The cable, which has landing stations in Nigeria and Ghana and branching units in Morocco, Canary Islands, Senegal and Ivory Coast, is said to ve cable of delivering high broadband capacity to West Africa, more than ten times what was available.

Cisco President, Emerging Markets, Paul Mountford, said “The deployment of new technology solutions can now be increased significantly throughout the sub-Saharan African region as Cisco and Main One join forces to develop a state of the art IP network. Cisco’s vision is to be the leading enabler of ICT and broadband acceleration in Africa through innovative, scalable, high-value technology offerings and solutions. Main One’s high capacity fibre optic cable will help to accelerate this vision into becoming a reality.”

With more than 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system, Mountford explained that the Cisco CRS-3 is designed to transform the broadband communication and entertainment industry by accelerating delivery of compelling new experiences for consumers, new revenue opportunities for Main One, and new ways to collaborate in the workplace. IP NGN is an important element in supporting delivery of high-quality, rich media Internet services.

He said that the Cisco IP NGN platform is scalable, and will empower Main One to address anticipated growth in Internet traffic caused by ongoing growth in and demand for Internet-based video services from IPTV to TelePresence.

In addition to the increased capacity, he added that the data center and cloud computing intelligence embedded in the Cisco CRS-3 using Network Positioning System, directs requests to data centers with available capacity. It will also support cloud-based virtual private networks (VPN).

Going by the unfolding trends in the industry, CISCO said its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast of 2009-2014 projects that consumer broadband usage and global IP NGN traffic will continue to climb significantly due to the new forms and expanded usage of interactive media and the explosion of video content across multiple devices, adding that IP traffic in the Middle East and Africa will reach 1 exabyte per month by 2014 at a rate of 45 percent.

While, Monthly Internet traffic in the Middle East and Africa will generate 182 million DVDs worth of traffic, or 727 petabytes per month. Business IP traffic will also grow fastest in the Middle East and Africa.

MainOne is wholly African and is the first privately owned submarine network cable in West Africa with initial landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal. A landmark achievement, Main One delivered its cable system on time and within budget, a rare occurrence with projects of this magnitude and complexity, while Cisco is a technology innovation company that is focused on networking that transforms connections, communicate and collaboration.