Main One, N5.6Bn Cable System Gets Nigeria, Ghana Licenses

Main One cable, the over N5.6 billion sub-marine optic fibre cable which will link African nations with their counterparts in the rest of the globe has achieved major breakthroughs after obtaining two important licenses that will fast track its launch in 2010, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can exclusively report.
The project now has Nigeria and Ghana cable licenses, two countries in West Africa where the cable system spanning over 14,000 kilometers will land.
The development signals the seriousness of Main One to provide the much-needed high capacity for international and Internet connectivity to countries between Portugal and South Africa on the West African coast.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that when ready, Nigeria and some other countries from the northern West Coast of Africa to Portugal, will enjoy significant drop in bandwidth prices.
Main One cable, led by Main Street Technologies has also received overwhelming endorsement from local and international investors especially because of the pedigree of promoters of the project.
Elated Funke Opeke, chief executive officer of Main Street Technologies said that Main One footprint is expected in Portugal by late January next year.
Opeke hopes that the first phase of Main One will be up in 2010 and is determined to see the completion of the second phase in 2011.
Ahead of this, Main One had earlier in the year penned down a deal with Tyco -  reputed as one of the strongest names in the construction of cable - for a turnkey supply contract for the System.
Main One Cable would encourage local content development via skills transfer of critical networking technologies and job creation with the location of the network operational centre in Nigeria.
The project was inspired by the Connect Africa Conference hosted by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Kigali, Rwanda, in October last year where industry players and leaders discussed the imperatives of connecting Africa to the digital age and creating jobs via the deployment of broadband network solutions and empowering ICT technologies.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek however gathered that Main One is one of the numerous international fibre projects competing to give the much-needed additional capacity and price competition to South Atlantic-3 (SAT-3), West African Sub-marine Cable (WASC)/ South Africa Far East (SAFE) route (SAT-3/WASC/SAFE), owned by national operators in 15 African countries, and 11 other investors.
Apart from Main One, there is the Glo-1, a 9,500 kilometre state-of-the-art international submarine cable being positioned as the solution to Nigeria and West Africa’s bandwidth requirements.
Globacom, Nigeria’s second national carrier, owners of the cable said that it will be ready in March 2009.
Elsewhere, the Uhurunet project, led by the e-Africa Commission (on behalf of Bahricom Development Company), hopes to be operational by the fourth quarter of 2010.
Yet there is another by Seacom, an undersea fibre-optic cable, which will link southern and eastern Africa with India and Europe; bringing down connectivity costs on the continent.