Undersea Cable Investments Hit $3Bn

Nigeria’s broadband revolution has a new impetus with the princely $100 million financing facility between MainOne, West Africa’s leading open access broadband provider and some banks to further expand the company’s undersea cable infrastructure, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can report.

With that single investment, the total investment in undersea cable infrastructure with landing points in Nigeria has hit some $3 billion.

It means that there are hopes of affordable, ubiquitous and more reliable broadband internet to feed millions of Nigerians hungry bandwidth capacity.

Under the latest deal arranged by First City Monument Bank (FCMB), MainOne would use the facility to invest in much needed infrastructure to hitherto unreached territories.

“We look forward to landing our cable in the shores of Port Harcourt and Calabar in the foreseeable future,” Ms. Funke Opeke, CEO, MainOne had exclusively told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek recently.

Other banks involve in the latest investment include Standard Chartered Bank, First Bank and Skye Bank.

The latest investment adds to the growing rich catalog of undersea cable telecommunication infrastructure in the last five years which includes Globacom’s 10, 000 Kilometres’ Glo-1 cable worth $800 million.

MTN has also landed its WACS system worth $600 million and ACE cable promoted by Orange Telecom of France worth $700 million which also lands in Nigeria.

These fresh investments are in addition to the South Atlantic 3 (or SAT-3) cable under Nitel, which experts have variously estimated to worth in excess of $600 million.

Ms. Opeke said the company’s reputation lies in its reliability which has earned it a somewhat preferred wholesale infrastructure service provider among major telecom oeratrors, ISPs, government MDAs, big enterprises and even educational institutions for broadband provision.