IN a move that significantly underscores its growing reputation as West Africa’s broadband service provider of choice, Main One Cable Company, Nigeria’s premier and leading provider of broadband Internet services to large telecommunication companies, Internet service providers and enterprises announced on Thursday, March 22, 2012, that it has made major network infrastructure upgrades designed to meet the ever-increasing service needs of its customers.
Maintaining high network availability is absolutely essential to the success of a broadband company. In its desire to meet its current requirements and future capacity needs, Main One in collaboration with its technical partner, Huawei, has upgraded from OSN9500 to the newer, more flexible OSN8800 which enables point-to-point 10 Gigabits per second Ethernet connections.
Speaking on the innovation, the Chief Technical Officer of Main One Cable, Mr. Johnnie Coleman, who made the disclosure in Lagos recently explained that the upgrade became imperative in view of the increasing demand the firm is recording on a daily basis.
“This upgrade will provide to our customers with minimum downtime, increased capacity, better network performance and enhanced network stability. It will also ensure easier upgrades and capacity expansion (scalability) for the future”
Main One customers may experience some downtime in the early hours of morning the weekend of March 24th as a result.
These changes are in addition to other recent upgrades in the network to light up more capacity on the submarine cable between Lagos, Accra and Portugal.
It will be recalled that since the Main One Cable network went live in July 2010, it has continued to break grounds with its open access, wholesale broadband connectivity, as well as the sale of bandwidth to enterprise customers. Main One currently has a growing list of major telecom companies, Internet service providers, and enterprise customers in Nigeria including MTN, Etisalat, Airtel, Swift Networks, Galaxy Communications, IPNX, Visafone, VDT, Tara Systems, GT Bank, and Ecobank.
In July 2010, Main One switched on its 1,920 Gbps, 7,000 kilometers long, submarine fiber optic cable system linking West Africa to Europe. The cable, which has landing stations in Nigeria and Ghana and branching units in Morocco, Canary Islands, Senegal and Ivory Coast, delivers unprecedented broadband capacity to West Africa, more than ten times what was available.
Main One is wholly African and is the first privately owned submarine network cable in West Africa with initial landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal. Main One delivered its cable system on time and within budget, a rare occurrence with projects of this magnitude and complexity.