By Submarine Cable NewsFeed
Main Street Technologies has announced the award of the turnkey supply contract for the Main One Cable System to Tyco Telecommunications.
The cable system will span 14,000 kilometers and provide the much-needed high capacity for international and Internet connectivity to countries between Portugal and South Africa on the West coast of Africa.
The submarine cable project is designed in two phases, both of which are scheduled for completion in May 2010. The dual fiber pair, 1.28 Terabits per second, Dense Wave Division Multiplex project will connect Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal in Phase 1 with onward connectivity through Portugal to Europe, Asia and the Americas; and connectivity extending to Angola and South Africa in the second Phase of the project.
Main One will provide international capacity into a region that has experienced explosive growth in tele-density in recent years, but which remains constrained with respect to access to international cable capacity for global connectivity.
The Main One Cable system will provide open access to regional telecom operators and Internet Service Providers at competitive rates that are less than 50% of current international bandwidth prices in the region available via SAT-3 or satellite service providers. As a business championed by local entrepreneurs, the company will encourage local content development via skills transfer of critical networking technologies and job creation with the location of the Network Operational Center (NOC) for the entire system in Nigeria. The system will ease the difficulties and reduce the costs of switching traffic between African countries without the need to go through Europe, as well as provide broadband capacity to expand Internet access in the sub-Saharan region, which currently stands at less than five percent.
Main Street Technologies Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Funke Opeke stated, “The execution of this contract for us with Tyco Telecommunications is quite timely given the difficulties faced by telecom operators and businesses in Nigeria due to the recently ended strike at incumbent operator NITEL, which shut down SAT-3, the country's only existing cable access. It demonstrates clearly that African countries such as Nigeria require additional cable capacity and diversity other than SAT-3 in order to sustain the growth of their economies and effectively participate in global commerce.”
Quoting Mike Rieger Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Project Management for Tyco Telecommunications, “We are pleased to have won the supply contract for Main One and look forward to delivering the first private, open access cable system in West Africa.”
