ByPrince Osuagwu

Internet users in Nigeria who may be hoping for a direct business deal with frontline broadband access providers in Nigeria, Main One cable company, to enhance their broadband end user experience, may still have to rely on the company’s resellers including major telecom operators and other ISPs.

This is as the company has reiterated its position not to go into retails even in the near future. In fact, the company revealed that going retail, was not even in its business strategy for now.

However, the good news is that not going retail for the company, does not mean that it would not monitor whether its broadband investment, rubs off positively on end users or employ strategies to create desired impact if expectant teeming Nigerians are not getting what would make them sing a new song.

Ms Funke Opeke, Main One CEO

Showing seriousness in this regard, the cable company has decided to flag off a programme tagged Partner Advantage Programme, aimed at working with its partners to provide benefits capable of expanding existing businesses, creating new business opportunities and as well grow capacity for the company.

Part of the benefits of the programme, included helping the partners leverage on existing and new infrastructure available to deliver capacity to collective customers, address complex last mile distribution business needs and address all requests for capacity subscriptions below 10Mbps.

Over all, the programme is expected at the end to increase internet penetration in Nigeria. In common language, the programme is aimed at beating out ways of offering MainOne customers more reduced prices which they in turn would pass over to the end users.

Dropping the hint of the programme, MainOne’s Head, Marketing and Strategy, Mr Adebayo Oyewole said his company has discovered that prices of bandwidth which were expected to come down with the landing of the undersea submarine cable, were still high, adding that if nothing was done to check that, the expected gains of the investment would take time to come and eventually look like a fluke. According to him, the programme may have the blessings of international giants like Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft among others.

According to Oyewole, this programme would see to a major reduction in data packages of the Nigerian telecom operators who are the main customers of the cable company and eventually rub-off positively on the scores of Nigerians hooked on their network services.

He also hinted that his company was going to launch its Internet Protocol, IP platform in July, to enable most of its customers who do not wish to buy an STM1 to also get better services directly from the company.

Although MainOne’s cable initiative has a total of 5terabytes capacity, Oyewole said that about 1.92 capacity has been built already, of which about 10 percent has already been let out in the last ten months.