In spite of the impressive growth rate recorded by telecommunications sector of the country’s economy especially the mobile space, there exist major challenge which has hindered development in the sector, and that is insufficient bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a major ingredient for enhanced voice, video and data transmission in telecommunications service delivery. Presently, West African countries have a high dependability on satellite based operators for fulfilling their bandwidth requirements which is complementary to South Atlantic Terminal Undersea cable Sat-3, the only submarine cable that offers bandwidth to the sub region.
The demand for bandwidth in the region far overwhelmed the availability which resulted in high cost and high dependent on satellite that has shortfalls.
More so, Sat-3 especially Nigerian end which is managed by moribund Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (Nitel) has been bedeviled with managerial challenges that results in service disruption. Severally, services of Sat-3 has been disrupted as a result of staff of Nitel embarking on strike action, moreover, when the cable suffers cut it takes weeks for it to be repaired basically because of inefficiency of the company managing the resource on the Nigeria end of the submarine cable.
All of these result in poor quality of service and high tariff charge by operators in telecommunications industry as they are required to provide alternative source to serve their customers when ever this is disruption. More so, the dream of Nigerians experiencing broadband service are being frustrated by none availability of enough bandwidth in the country. Bandwidth providers are retailing bandwidth they procure in bulk, which invariably is very expensive.
Against this backdrop that operators and some consortium in the West African sub region began initiatives to provide alternative to Sat-3 in the undersea cable space. Among such initiatives from Nigeria are Glo 1 which just landed last week in Lagos, Mainstreet Technologies, and a consortium of telecoms operators that will lay South Africa’s undersea cable around West Africa to Europe, under the aegis West Africa Cable System.
There comes Glo 1
Glo 1 is the world’s first submarine optic fibre cable to be built by a single individual company. The trend in the global telecommunication industry is for a consortium of companies or even nations to combine resources to build submarine cables as was the case with the Sat submarine 3 cable which was built by a consortium of 36 countries.
Glo 1 was conceived some four years ago basically to enhance connectivity between Nigeria and other West African countries to the rest of the world.
The 9,800km-long cable run from United Kingdom through Mauritania, Morocco and 16 West African countries with dedicated extension to New York, was anchored at its landing station at Alpha Beach, Lekki, Lagos.
The Glo 1 cable will deliver transmission capacity that will radically change Nigeria and Africa’s economic landscape by providing unprecedented high speed internet services and make telecom services much faster, more reliable and cheaper for consumers.
Paddy Adenuga, Globacom’s group executive director, said Glo-1’s current and ultimate capacity is enough to cater for the required broadband capacity of Nigeria for at least the next 15 to 20 years.
Glo 1 has a current capacity of 640Gigabit per second and an ultimate capacity of 2.5 Terabit per second.
Adenuga said, Glo 1 will provide the needed opportunity for West African  countries and indeed Africa to leap forward economically through an excellent communication network and a cost-effective voice, data, video and e-commerce services across Africa, Europe  and the rest of the world.
“The facility will provide the most comprehensive international communication services on the continent to bridge the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the World,’ he added.
Adenuga said that Glo 1 has 99.9% up time reliability, world-class long distance voice, video and data communication services for African customers, adding that the cable will support the large bandwidth requirements of direct consumers and other service providers.
He said the cable will free up resources for other forms of investments which governments and business developments need through broad market coverage at high capacity and at a fraction of cost and time.
Glo 1 will also facilitate foreign investment and employment opportunities in the sub region, he stated.
According to him, the successful delivery of the cable has shown that Globacom has an awesome capacity to deliver complex projects.
Other benefits of the cable include facilitation of teleconferencing, distance learning, disaster recovery and telemedicine among several other benefits for the people.
The facility will aid on-line diagnosis and video conferencing during surgery and research, while distance learning will be made easy by enabling the participation of a class of students and lecturers from different parts of the world in real time.
Globacom and Alcatel-Lucent officials said the facility will be live in about six weeks when all the connections have been effected.
Alcatel-Lucent, the world leader in submarine cable installation which handled the project, congratulated Globacom for achieving the historic feat.
The Intrepid, the ship which brought the Glo 1 cable has left for Accra, Ghana to complete the Phase One of the installation in other West African countries including Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire. The landing of Glo 1 in Ghana will also boost the preparation for the nationwide launch of Glo Mobile in Ghana.
The company also said that the phase 2 of the submarine cable project will connect South Africa through Angola.
Lanre Ajayi, president, Nigerian Internet Group, said that the landing of Glo 1 in Nigeria is a welcome development which is going to bring a lot of developments required to change the economic fortune of the country.
According to him, internet is an enabler of economic development which guarantees online business services that will offer employment opportunities to Nigerians.
He said that Glo 1 is posed to bring down the cost of internet as well as increase the speed of internet in the country which will ultimately provide more business opportunities. He added that the country will thereafter witness a higher gross domestic product (GDP).
Ajayi however, advices Globacom to ensure that the resources is made open to other service providers in the telecommunications space of the economy including their competitors. He noted that by making it open that the desired benefits will be realized. He also added that Globacom should lay much emphasizes on maintenance of the cable and anticipate breakdown by raising a maintenance team that will be well equipped to undertake repair of any damage on the cable.
Jameel Mohammed, group chief operating officer, Globacom, said Glo 1 would deliver transmission capacity that would radically change Nigeria and West Africa’s economic landscape by linking 17 countries to the rest of the world.
Jameel said the landing of Glo-1 was another milestone in the history of Nigeria’s communications industry, adding that the cable would provide unprecedented high speed internet services and make telecom services much faster, more reliable and cheaper for consumers.
Explaining the seeming delay in Glo-1’s arrival, Mohammed said that implementing submarine cable projects, particularly one spanning about 10,000 km from London to Lagos is an initiative that usually takes between two to two and a half years to complete.
But, that because the cable passed through various territorial waters and jurisdictions of several African countries, Globacom had to contend with lengthy approval processes.
“We needed permissions at many levels from all those countries to pass the cable through their territorial waters. We needed approval from security agencies, approvals from oil companies and from various bodies”, he said.
He disclosed that the telecoms giant had factored Nigeria’s long term bandwidth requirements into the equation, adding that Glo 1 "can carry voice traffic of all operators internationally. We can also provide international private leased circuit (IPLC) for corporates”.
He said high quality work was done in deeply burying the undersea cable in such a way that there would be little or no chance of disruptions.
The undersea cable is designed with the latest technology and it is the first such state of the art submarine cable which will connect Nigeria directly to United Kingdom and further to the United States, the two major data hubs of the world.