By Richard Udofia

One of Africa’s leading communications  services and data centre providers, Mainone Company recently announced the completion of the upgrade of its submarine cable network between Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal to a 100G wavelength system.

The new 100G wavelength upgrade,  implemented using the Xtera Nu-wave Optima optical networking platform is expected to provide additional capacity support for the company’s delivery of high-bandwidth services, and a more resilient network for its customers.

This upgrade provides the company the capability to offer higher capacity bandwidth to its wholesale customers in West Africa who are increasingly demanding such services for Internet access via their 3G and 4G networks.

Chief executive officer of the company, Ms. Funke Opeke at the event in Lagos said ”we are starting to see an information explosion in West Africa that has brought about a dramatic increase in network traffic this year and this has highlighted the need to scale up our network for future demand.

As a leading provider of data capacity to 8 countries in West Africa, and with the pending integration of our NigerCam system to Cameroun and Nigeria’s South-South region, we needed to deploy more advanced technology to reliably meet our customer’s need for advanced and robust communications services.

This upgrade to 100G provides MainOne the platform to further deepen broadband penetration in West Africa and meet the demands of our growing wholesale data business”.

Meanwhile the chief executive officer of Xtera, Mr. Jon Hopper said that Xtera is extremely pleased to help MainOne upgrade its subsea cable infrastructure between Nigeria and Portugal. New capacity will be added during this upgrade by deploying our high-capacity, long-distance optical networking product, Nu-Wave Optima.

“The use of this advanced, field-proven multi-purpose platform will allow MainOne to introduce 100G services and support the development of digital economy in western Africa.”

MainOne’s submarine cable system links West Africa with Europe, thereby bringing ultra-fast broadband to the region.

It runs from Seixal in Portugal through Accra in Ghana to Lagos in Nigeria, with capacity to land branches in Morocco, Canary Islands, Senegal, and Ivory Coast.

The cable system, which now has an upgradable capacity of over 10 Terabits per second, first went live in July 2010, becoming the first private subsea cable to bring open-access, broadband capacity to West Africa.