MainOne starts expansion, lowers wholesale price by 80%

Chief Executive Officer, MainOne Cable, Ms Funke Opeke, has disclosed that her firm has commenced expansion of its infrastructure to enable more Nigerians, mostly in other parts of the country to have access to the firm’s services, just as the MainOne crashed its wholesale prices by 80 per cent.

This was contained in a press statement made available to ITRealms Online and endorsed by the Marketing Communications Executive, Adedayo Odulate.

Ms. Opeke was quoted to have said that the investment became imperative in view of the increasing demand the firm has recorded on a daily basis in recent times.

“Many people have discovered the need for better access to the internet at a very fast and cheap rate and they also want to be able to use new kinds of applications, as well as access different types of content,” she said, stressing that people know they want better access to the internet.

According to her, people also want Internet faster, cheaper, and capable of driving new kinds of applications, access different types of content.

So, in order to service more customers, she said, Main One has started investing in distribution infrastructure, building its own networks when it could not find commercially reasonable rates.

“The biggest challenge that we see is getting the capacity we have in this big pipe that we brought into Nigeria and Ghana across the region to reach the people and businesses where they need the service,” she said.

Noting that she was not surprised with the huge market potentials MainOne now contends with as it was envisaged long before the fibre-optic cable was launched, Ms. Opeke expressed the hope for the high demand when they first started sketching out business plan far back in 2007.

Besides, she said, servicing the internet needs in all the nooks and crannies of Nigeria, emphasizing, there are also plans to extend the cable down the coast to South Africa and connect it with Seacom, the underwater East African fibre-optic cable which became fully operational in four years ago.

In addition, she said that the fibre-optic cable facility launched by her firm in 2010 has an unmatched capacity of 1.92 terabits a second and provides open-access, broadband services in Nigeria and Ghana with further plans to commence operations in other West Africa countries.

Barely six months after the commercial launch, Opeke noted that the facility has helped improve the availability of internet services, especially in Lagos and Accra, as well as lowering of wholesale prices significantly, by up to 80 per cent.

The MainOne boss also identified lack of a national backbone infrastructure on an open-access basis as a factor militating against transportation of capacity within Nigeria. Connecting people from the company’s landing point in Nigeria to London, she explained, costs less than connecting people across Lagos.

“You have to buy that infrastructure from people who own it for their own proprietary use,” she said.

ITRealms Online recalls that MainOne Cable, facilitates connections of West Africa with Europe, providing ultra-fast broadband in the region; culminating in the cable running from Lagos in Nigeria through Accra in Ghana to Seixal in Portugal and branches out in Ivory Coast, Senegal, Canary Islands and Morocco.

Remmy Nweke

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