MainOne, which recently announced plans for a new data centre facility in Ghana, has made news again, this time in Cote d’Ivoire.
The provider of wholesale and enterprise connectivity and data centre services across West Africa says it has landed its submarine cable in Grand Bassam, Cote D’Ivoire.
The Grand Bassam landing, which follows the recent completion of a landing in Dakar, Senegal, will extend the reach of the cable into Cote D’Ivoire and neighbouring countries. This is, says MainOne, the first commercial cable in service to deploy spectrum sharing capabilities guaranteed to deepen infrastructure sharing and lower the cost of delivering broadband services to West Africa. Following the landing at the Grand Bassam beach, the cable will be connected to an existing branching unit on the MainOne cable trunk already strategically located offshore.
The upgrade of the electronics on the cable and the implementation of spectrum sharing functionality will now enable multiple operators to share optical spectrum on the submarine pair with up to 10 terabits of capacity. The availability of such increments in capacity is, says MainOne, expected to further accelerate the deployment of 4G services, in addition to fixed broadband, across the region. The submarine cable will also be connected to the newly constructed MainOne data centre in Abidjan, built alongside the cable landing station.
MainOne’s submarine cable was the first private subsea cable to deliver open-access broadband capacity to West Africa in 2010. The MainOne system traverses the coast of West Africa with fully operational landing stations from Seixal in Portugal through Accra in Ghana to Lagos in Nigeria. New branches have been added in Dakar, Senegal and Grand Bassam, Cote D’Ivoire. Additional branching units in Morocco and Tenerife have yet to be connected.