TE SubCom to Extend MainOne Cable System to Francophone Region
By IT Web Africa
September 20, 2018
By IT Web AfricaTE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd company, has secured a contract from connectivity and datacentre solutions provider MainOne to extend its active submarine cable system into West Africa's francophone region with two additional branches connecting Senegal (Dakar) and Cote D'Ivoire (Abidjan).
According to a media statement issued by the companies, these new branches will connect to MainOne's 7,000km cable system, which extends from Portugal to Nigeria, “and will inject new technology that upgrades the system to a potential capacity of 10TBps by November 2019 when the subsea system becomes operational.”
With this development, MainOne will have landing points in five markets – Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cote D'Ivoire and Portugal, in addition to Cameroon.
The companies say francophone countries in West Africa, including Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania, continue to experience an increased demand for advanced telecom services and will benefit from the network extension into Cote D'Ivoire and Senegal.
Kazeem Oladepo, MainOne's regional executive for West Africa, said, “MainOne continues to lead the current digital transformation of the region by ushering in affordable connectivity to drive economic development. Our objective remains focused on bridging the digital divide between West Africa and the rest of the world. We have, and will continue to, invest significantly in projects to accelerate broadband access to help local businesses address the challenges they face procuring capacity at competitive rates. This extension of our subsea cable to Senegal and Cote D'Ivoire will further open up their international bandwidth markets, drive down costs and ultimately boost the economic and commercial development of the region.”
Debbie Brask, vice president, project management of TE SubCom, added, “These MainOne enhancements bring two additional connectivity options to this rapidly growing region. MainOne has also selected SubCom's WSS ROADM technology to achieve dynamic capacity management in fulfilling the region's burgeoning demand.”
