Main One begins work on cable ring in West Africa

Main One has commenced work on its 12,900-kilometer cable project to connect the West African sub-region to other parts of the world.

The project will expand the frontiers of Internet access in West Africa and bring about heavy tariff reductions, said Main One CEO Funke Opeke in a statement.

"Main One will help to ease the difficulties of switching traffic between African countries, eliminating the inconvenience and added costs of first routing traffic to Europe," she explained.

Main One's acquisition of the first undersea cable system landing license in West Africa has been a major milestone for the company, Opeke said, allowing for Tyco Telecommunications to implement Main One's project. Main One has already advanced payment to Tyco for both phases of the project.

The first phase of the project, Opeke revealed, will include laying 6,900 kilometers of undersea fiber-optic cable extending from Portugal to Nigeria and Ghana. The second phase, she said, is expected to extend another 6,000 kilometers to South Africa and Angola using DWM (dense wave multiplexing) technology of 1.28T bps (bits per second) with two fiber pairs.

The technology has been designed to deliver more capacity to the region than any of the other existing or proposed under-sea fiber projects, Opeke said.

In addition to increasing Internet access and decreasing tariffs by at least 20 percent, Main One's cable project aims to create new jobs in West Africa.

With the support individual investors in the region, private equity institutions, development finance institutions and a handful of African banks, Opeke said that Main Line's cable project is on running on schedule to be completed in May 2010.