By Leadership
As MTN Nigeria prepares to go-live on the West African Cable System (WACS), a 14,000 kilometres fibre optic submarine cable with a capacity of 5.12 terabits per second (tbps), which berthed in the country last year, the expectation that Nigeria e-commerce and emergence as a digital economy may have to wait until the issue of carrying bandwidth traffic to the hinterlands is addressed.
The WACS consortium include MTN, Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable and Wireless Worldwide; Congo Telecom.; Société Congolaise des Postes et Télécommunications (“SCPT”), PT Communicacoes, Togo Telecom, Tata Communications, Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA Ltd, and Vodacom Group Ltd. WACS which cost about $650 million spans the entire West African coast and terminating in the United Kingdom.
