Funke Opeke is iconic technologist and chief executive officer and founder of Main Street Technologies, a holding company launched to build and operate the Main One submarine cable system linking countries in West and Central Africa with each other and connecting in Europe with other existing cable systems linking the Americas and Asia. Opeke has local and international experience spanning over 25 years experience. She has served as chief technical officer, MTN Nigeria and was also executive director, Performance Assurance with the Wholesale Division of Verizon Communications, New York. She has Bachelor of Science in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. Opeke spoke to chike onwuegbuchi and funmi ilesanim

Undersea Fibre Optic Cable Initiative
A couple of things formed this initiative, one is the challenge we all have in our daily existence trying to get access to the internet and facilitate business communication. How difficult it is to get access, and how expensive the cost is. I have the awareness that other parts of the world that enjoy better access to high speed and broadband communications have different kinds of infrastructure that we do not have which.
Extent of Work Done in the Project
The reception we have had from the industry has been warm. In terms of where the project is, all of the engineering work has been done the marine survey where you actually have the vessel go under water and basically test the route where the cable is supposed to go on is just about completing within a few days. Next, we have the manufacturing which has already started, so work is advanced in that respect. Also, we have cable landing, where the cable actually comes in, as well as all the equipment been manufactured will be housed and connected with the cable.
We have one of those stations already in place and two that will house probably constructions will be in place by the end of the year. Once the cables are all manufactured which should take place later this year, then the cable will be installed from the end of this year till next year and we should be in service in the middle of 2010.

Reduction in the cost of Bandwidth and Access Improvement
Our project deals with the cost of international bandwidth and access to the internet. It is obviously a fibre optic based solution, it is a wired solution but only on the international backbone side. Our cost would be, depending on how much volume you buy and how long you subscribe to the service would be as low as 10-20 percent of what people are paying today for such equivalent services. Basically, if you are currently paying $100 for that international bandwidth, you will be looking at a long time subscription basis with us to pay $10 or $20. That is just an analogy, because we really do not sell in small units, we are a wholesale provider, so we would be selling capacity to operators or Internet Service Providers who would then provide services to the last mile subscribers. As you know, currently Nigeria has over 60 million wireless phone subscribers, a lot of those users have access to the internet on their devices. In addition, we have an increased number of laptops and computers where a lot of services are also delivered by wireless technology. We are not looking to replicate the access networks but we are looking to make a very big pipe for international internet connectivity available to all the providers at a very low cost. We hope that by reducing their cost, they would then pass on savings to the end consumer and that they would get a benefit of that cost reduction. We have reasons to believe that, indeed, it would be the case because as you know in the retail telecom market in Nigeria today, there are quite a good number of operators so there is healthy competition.
We think we would further drive the competition especially on the data side by bringing the entry cost for internet access down, it would make it more affordable to individuals, educational institutions, businesses and so the degree of internet access penetration we expect in the country would be much higher than we have today because the cost to get there would be much more lower.
Competition in the Market   
We are quite comfortable to compete in delivering services, which clearly is my background in working with private sector telecommunications service delivery, so we are able to compete. At the end of the day, it is a value proposition to the customer. We are solely focused on providing wholesale services in this segment, we understand the needs of our market. We are borne out of this market so we know what the operators require and we know the unique challenges they face and we bring a strong management team and business plan to address their requirements, so we are quite comfortable that we are able to compete. We do believe in competition because we cannot see the results in the monopoly situation we are with Sat-3 on this market. Competition will drive more value to the consumer and as long as it is healthy, we welcome competition and we believe it is a big enough market that we can deliver superior value and services to our customers.
Extending the Service outside Wholesale
We understand that concern, but when you look at the amount of capital that has been invested in the Nigerian telecommunications industry in recent years, it looked like always efficiently nice, but clearly we believe enough investment has been made for people to pay attention and care to ensure that they are generating a good return on the investment that has already been made. Truly, we do not see ourselves having to extend the service to areas where we feel are built already and where there is adequate infrastructure.
However, if it becomes the situation that we cannot get our services to the hinter land or to the rural areas, we may be compelled into doing that. We also see the regulators taking a lot of steps to facilitate sharing to drive Wire Nigeria project and the State Accelerated Broadband initiative (Sabi). We believe these initiatives would be complementary to our effort and we truly hope that they succeed so we do not have to worry about the nationwide distribution, but we can worry about additional value added services on our wholesale basis.
In addition, as a  regional project there are other countries in the region who face the same challenge of high cost and limited access to international  communications, so we see the ability to work with partners to extend the reach of our services to those under-served areas across Africa. Probably an area where we are not replicating something that someone else had already done, we are adding value to what is already on ground and ensuring that we add value in a way that the end consumer can benefit from it.

Landing Points
We have initiated the process; right now our contract is to build runs from Portugal to Nigeria and would land in Nigeria and Ghana. We are also working with Ivory Coast, Senegal, Morocco and the Canari Islands to land the cable. In particular, we want to do a phase two of our project which goes down to South Africa and that is the most challenging because the regulatory framework in South Africa is not opened at this point to operators who are not majorly owned by South African networks.
Our objective eventually is to extend the connectivity down the entire coast line on the west coast of Africa. We hope to get licensed in two or three months. Getting a license depends on the co-operation of the governments; we have been licensed to operate in Nigeria and Ghana. For the cable we are building now, we have branches that we are putting towards Ivory Coast, Senegal, Morocco and the Canari Islands. Those are on-going negotiations and discussions because we have made investments towards landing in those particular areas. We expect that in the course of the year, we will make specific announcement on it. Again, we cannot pre-judge the timing of those things happening. Going down to South Africa is another conversation that we have been engaged in and we would continue to move that along and we hope that authorities in each of these countries are responsive and indeed grant us the ability to land the cable there.

.
Funding of the Project
The project is funded by financial institutions and the goodwill of individuals who are our seed investors out of Nigeria and Ghana. We started with fundings from these individuals clearly to a point where it was viable. Then we have gone to financial institutions for further support to complete the project. The African Development Bank (ADB) recently approved a loan of $66 million towards the overall cost of the project. We have other Nigerian institutions who have approved equity investments by becoming shareholders in the company and others who have agreed to help us meet the overall cost of the project. It is a long term infrastructure project and we have worked on a structure that would allow us spend with strict guidelines to complete the project before we start generating revenue and then pay those obligations.
Manpower
So far our manpower resources have been focused on engineering, developing the project and getting it done. We have sought the best resources both locally and internationally into a unified team in the company to help us actualize the project. We are actually pleased with the progress we have made to get to where we are today. We have been able to identify the people here, they are rising up to the challenge assisted by the offshore specialists’ resources that we brought on board and we are getting the job done. It is a development process, we think as Africans we need to take ownership of our destiny and that we do have various skills.
Some of us bring international and relevant experience and are able to provide the leadership and direction to build that robust world class team. Basically, we do not want anything less in terms of our standards to deliver the service. It is a work in progress but we are confident that Nigerians with the assistance of experienced international players can indeed manage this network we are building.

Challenges
It is a complex multi-dimensional project, it is capital intensive and a large construction project across many countries, so you have a lot of legal, regulatory and all kinds of permit issues. The engineering is complex, the operation requires a certain diligent business process that must be complied with and this needs to be done efficiently.
There is a whole customer service aspect and delivering service to the customer and ensuring high availability on a regular basis. The business needs have to be met, service offering must be in line with expectations and prices must remain competitive.
There is quite a bit of work which I think is not in one specific area with respect to all the permit we need across the different jurisdictions in licenses. Being a pioneering project, we are doing the ground breaking work and configuring specifically what those are so I would say that has been an area of challenge. However, people have been very receptive to our ideas and giving us the support we need to make it happen. It is challenging but we are getting it done.