By Prince Osuagwu

Africa in general, has the lowest broadband penetration in the world. Mobile penetration stands at just over 40%. As Africa continues to develop at a rather brisk pace, bandwidth requirements for everything from broadcast to broadband are going to grow exponentially. Now the underlying demographics suggest strongly that long-term overcapacity predictions are overdone.

So it’s all about delivering the right capacity to Africa, bandwidth capable of meeting the region’s needs that are as diverse and unique as the African countries themselves.

Incidentally every growth in Africa, is largely measured by how Nigeria fares. Having the opportunity of landing two major submarine broadband initiatives, Glo1 and MainOne, the journey to a robust broadband experience actually kicked off.

However, within the short time since landing, Main One seems to be targeting to be a key link in the African broadband network. Financing and developing a broadband submarine cable system stretching some 7,000 km along the Western Africa to Europe. A 1, 920 Gbps submarine Fibre optic cable with landing stations in Nigeria,Ghana and branching units in Morocco, Canary Island, Senegal and Ivory Coast.

Bringing with it a vast supply of high quality and affordable broadband, Nigeria and indeed several of Africa’s most underserved nations are predicted to see more than 10 fold increases in bandwidth penetration.

To achieve this perhaps, MainOne has embarked on evolution of partnerships introduction of products and services and would like to be known for contributing largely in building the African Internet experience.

Although an expanded resilient network is a crucial element of creating this robust African Internet experience, another factor, is providing innovative customer product solutions that can fully unlock the benefits of this increased access to bandwidth. Although MainOne’s vision has been built on the backbone of open-access and equitable principles, it has however maintained that it will not retail bandwidth. It is with this vision in mind that MAINONE is introducing a variety of innovative products and services to the market, including IP transit services.

Global partnerships

In May, Main One announced its decision to deploy a new portfolio of IP-enabled services and has chosen to partner with Global Crossing ,a leading global IP solutions provider, in order to bring global connectivity to its clients. This strategic agreement enables Main One to further extend its customers connectivity in countries where it doesn’t have coverage by being part of the Global Crossing Tier 1 MPLS network.

This network, reaches more than 700 cities in more than 70 countries. and it would enable MainOne customers to extend their connectivity through across the US, Canadian and Latin American markets.

In addition to expanding Main One’s reach, the partnership increases flexibility with its new set of products and provide significantly reduced transit charges for customer terminations.

According to Main One’s head of Marketing and Strategy, Adebayo Oyewole, “We chose Global Crossing for its particular regional strengths. Our partnership with Global Crossing enhances Main One’s position as the one-stop shop for accessing the public Internet via the Main One network, which is designed for high capacity service. The new product portfolio enables Main One to deliver a wide range of connectivity options to geographically dispersed locations, while reducing customers’ costs by converging previously disparate data, voice and video networks.

With the partnership, customers could start small and grow with confidence because of the opportunity of tuning in to the fast changing needs of the 21st century

Main One joins a select list of top-tier service providers offering Global Crossing Fast-Track Services portfolio to their enterprise end users. In addition to Converged IP Services and Private Line, Fast-Track Services include Ethernet, Collaboration and Managed Services.

Perhaps that is why Global Crossing’s head of Carrier Sales for South Europe, Middle East and Africa Habib Issa, said: “We’re very pleased to join with Main One in offering its customers global access and IP-based solutions”

Romance with SEACOM

In a similar development, the company also partnered with a leading African cable operator, SEACOM in an effort that has resulted in interconnecting their West and East African Cable Systems to launch capacity services from one Point of Presence, PoP to another, from a STM-1 level and above.

This partnership extended the Main One and SEACOM networks to create a system that offers connection between any SEACOM and Main One PoPs all around Africa between South Africa and Nigeria.

The SEACOM submarine cable launched on 23 July 2009, directly connects South Africa and Eastern Africa with Europe and Southern Asia, covering a distance of over 17 000km worth of fibre optic technology.

At consummation of the romance, an excited Funke Opeke, Main One CEO, said that while efforts to implement a physical cable between Nigeria and South Africa continues, it was all to satisfy many of the customers’ immediate requirements for capacity between Nigeria and South Africa.

SEACOM CEO, Brian Herlihy described his company’s romance with Main One as a ring-type system around the entire continent, adding that it was the best way to attain adequate redundancy whilst offering customers a comprehensive connectivity solution.

However the benefits of increased bandwidth with the landing of the submarine, is the build-up of both the Nigerian and African Internet. At least let the Nigerian Internet experience be characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download speeds, uninterrupted video streaming, and interconnected African markets. Interestingly access to internet can transform other socio-economic activities even as cheap broadband connectivity provides a myraid of other economic opportunities that can translate to improved customer experience.

That is where Nigeria is heading to but not yet there at the moment.