Business
Underwater Cables Bring Faster Internet To W’ Africa – Opeke
Stretching some 7,000 kilometers along the West African coastline, a submarine fiber-optic cable emerges off the coast of Nigeria to help bridge the digital divide in the continent.
Dubbed Main One Cable, the system links West Africa with Europe, bringing ultra-fast broadband in the region. It runs from Seixal in Portugal through Accra in Ghana to Lagos in Nigeria and branches out in Morocco, Canary Islands, Senegal, and Ivory Coast.
The cable, which has a capacity of 1.92 terabits a second, first went live in July 2010, becoming the first subsea cable to bring open-access, broadband capacity in West Africa, according to Funke Opeke, chief executive of Nigeria’s Main One Cable Company who spoke to CNN, recently.
She says high-speed, low-priced, reliable broadband is key in transforming African economies and creating job opportunities.
“When you think of Africa coming into the information age, you think of educational institutions, you think of business opportunities, you think of social awareness, better communication, transparency in government,” says Opeke, a former executive at U.S. telecoms giant Verizon.
“In order to make Africa (and) Nigeria competitive again and in order to make our schools competitive, to make businesses here competitive and … to give young people access to opportunities, access to markets, access to ideas … we need a society, as a population to be better connected to the internet,” she adds.
After the launch of Main Cable One, more undersea fiber-optic projects have been rolled out in the region, including Glo 1 by Nigerian telecoms group Globacom. Similarly, several other efforts have been deployed in eastern and southern Africa in recent years.
Yet, slow connectivity and high internet costs are still major problems — according to figures by the International Telecommunication Union, Internet-user penetration in sub-Saharan Africa was 10.6% in 2010, far behind the world average of about 30%.
“Even in the countries in which we’re already in-land, broadband penetration is still under 10% rate, so there’s a lot of road for growth and improvement,” says Opeke.
Born in Nigeria, Opeke moved to the United States in 1984 to study at Columbia University. After a 20-year-old career in the U.S. telecommunications industry she returned to Nigeria in 2005, where she saw “first-hand” the country’s absence of internet infrastructure and the need for better web connectivity.
“I just felt personally the need was so glaring and that was what motivated me to start trying to solve the problem,” says Opeke. “The more I looked at it on my kitchen table the more visible it became to put a business together and that’s what I did.”
Starting all by herself, Opeke managed to raise $240 million after securing the support of various investors from the continent.
“It’s all African financing,” she explains, “I look at those people who wrote checks … the angel investors when I had no license, it was a business sheet on a piece of paper and it really wasn’t about making money, it was really about a deep understanding and desire to transform a society and to say that we could address some of these problems Africa had.
“That we understood the challenges, there was a lot of work to be done and that we wanted to pull people on board, pull ourselves together to address those problems,” she adds.
Today, Opeke says, the system has helped improve the availability of internet services, especially in Lagos and Accra, as well as lowering wholesale prices significantly, by up to 80 per cent.
But despite the big decrease in wholesale cost, Opeke notes that consumers have still not seen a difference in the price they pay — she says that Nigeria’s entire infrastructure is self-provisioned by different retail operators, which keep charging the same prices for the domestic part of the services.
“The people who own the distribution networks are not passing on the saving, there’s no open-access distribution or common carriers like you would have in a developed market,” says Opeke.
The lack of a national backbone infrastructure on an open-access basis is also making expensive to move capacity within Nigeria, according to Opeke. As a result, she says, connecting people from the company’s landing point in Nigeria to London costs less than connecting people across Lagos.
“You have to buy that infrastructure from people who own it for their own proprietary use, so it’s a cartel-like situation,” she says.
Therefore, Main One Cable, which does not sell its capacity directly to homes or small and medium-size businesses, has also started investing in distribution infrastructure, building its own networks when it can’t find “commercially reasonable rates,” as Opeke explains.
“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 says.
“Payment of tuition fees for undergraduate/postgraduate studies shall be subject to a maximum limit of $25,000.00 per semester,” the Manual states.
The expansion of international card limits also reflects growing confidence among lenders that foreign exchange liquidity has improved enough to support retail dollar transactions.
Speaking recently at the BusinessDay 14th Annual CEO Forum in Lagos, CBN Olayemi Cardoso, governor of the CBN said buying and selling activities now increasingly determine outcomes in the foreign exchange market, unlike in the past when market participants relied heavily on routine Central Bank interventions.
According to Cardoso, Nigeria’s net foreign exchange reserves have risen from just over $3 billion at the start of the reform programme to more than $40 billion, while gross reserves have climbed to about $52 billion, providing stronger confidence for investors and enabling the Central Bank to reserve interventions for periods of market stress rather than day-to-day liquidity management.
The restoration and expansion of international naira card spending limits are increasingly being seen as one of the clearest signs that the benefits of the CBN’s foreign exchange reforms are beginning to reach households, students and businesses making legitimate cross-border payments.
The Secretary-General and Chief Executive Officer, WEC, Dr Angela Wilkinson, disclosed this in a statement, last Thursday.
“Nigeria’s participation comes at a pivotal time as the country seeks to expand energy access, strengthen energy security, accelerate gas development and mobilise the capital required for industrialisation and sustainable economic growth.
“WEC Nigeria will convene leaders from across the energy ecosystem, apply the WEC’s globally recognised Energy Trilemma framework to Nigeria’s unique context, and promote evidence-based dialogue, practical collaboration and informed policymaking.
“It will also ensure that Nigerian and broader African perspectives contribute meaningfully to global energy conversations,” she said.
Wilkinson expressed confidence that Nigeria would play a significant leadership role at the World Energy Congress scheduled for Riyadh in April 2027 and beyond.
The statement also quoted the Chairman of WEC Nigeria, Isa, as describing the country’s participation as an opportunity to deepen national and African leadership within the global energy community through practical solutions tailored to regional development priorities.
He said the platform would promote collaboration across sectors and attract sustainable investments into Nigeria’s energy sector.
The Chief Executive Officer of WEC Nigeria, Wunti, was quoted in the statement as saying that the council would connect leadership, evidence and investment to build a secure, affordable and sustainable energy system.
“This system will be capable of driving economic growth and shared prosperity.”
According to him, the platform will also connect Nigerian institutions and businesses with international knowledge, technology, partnerships and investment opportunities through the World Energy Council’s global network.
Recall that WEC, founded in 1923, is the world’s oldest independent and impartial community of energy leaders and practitioners, advancing informed, collaborative and practical action across the global energy system.
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