Nigerian CommunicationWeek

Suburban Partners Cisco on Affordable Internet Services

Suburban, West Africa’s premier Next Generation Carrier and Cisco are set to position Nigeria to meet the challenges of the new Internet boom and reduce high costs of broadband as they held the first ever Internet Service Providers Forum in Nigeria last week at the Eko Hotel and Suites.

Suburban has taken major steps to address the supply of internet bandwidth, which is the primary bottleneck affecting the penetration of internet services in Nigeria. By making available a 10Gigabit connection into the global internet backbone, and conceptualizing the ISP Forum, Suburban in collaboration with Cisco intends to open further dialogue on how additional solutions can be created to address other issues

Bruce Ayonote, chief executive officer noted that internet which is a major tool for development has not been adequately adopted in our country and that one of the major reasons for that is access to infrastructure and technology . He therefore said that the collaboration between Cisco and Suburban has taken that barrier out even as he said that at present, Nigeria has access to the internet and envisages that such connection will leapfrog our development and put us at par with countries of the developed world. He said the forum was to inform their customers how that could be impact on their own customers.

"The objective of the forum is to make the internet as accessible in Nigeria as it is anywhere else on the globe, in terms of quality, speed, price and availability. The key to achieving this objective is to create a culture of collaboration between service providers that will be sustained for long term benefit. Internet Service Providers, as a gateway between the internet and the people, have a critical role to play in the socio-economic development of Nigeria. The internet is increasingly becoming a necessity in this present information age and Nigerians should have the opportunity to positively leverage this resource to our optimal benefit," Ayonote emphasized

Ayonote revealed that services such as video services and video cam solutions for instance, which can be used to make news more interesting and even make the audience have a more realistic feel for the information he is getting which service hitherto could not be provided to their customers but are possible in other parts of the world can now be made available to their customers. He said further that such services go beyond news and entertainment to social services such as health care where you can look at solutions like telemedicine and in education where you have e-learning and other value added services that have been a major value on the internet.

A lot of Internet Service Providers have gone out of business because they didn’t have access to resources that would enable them carry out their businesses properly. Some of these resources include bandwidth; network resources and the robustness of the network to enable them carry out applications that will make them comfortable. Ayonote said Cisco and suburban are addressing these so that ISPs can now come out and carry applications they couldn’t handle before.

He also informed that Cisco was the obvious choice for a technology partner in executing this novel internet development strategy as eighty percent of internet traffic runs on Cisco technology adding that Cisco has the expertise and technical know-how to add value to the collaborative effort as well as provide unequivocal business support that would be invaluable to all stakeholders.

Allstar Maclennan, head of service provider, Emerging Africa Markets, Cisco Systems Limited said that Cisco is investing $ 6.8b on research and development

to be able to develop new products that will continue to place the company on the top .

Suburban has been at the cutting edge of innovative technological solutions and has successfully built a fiber based Next Generation Network that spans the West Africa sub-region while providing global MPLS connectivity reach. In addition to its strategic relationship with Cisco, Suburban has partnered with other global connectivity and backbone providers to deliver a full compliment of voice, data and video solutions to West Africa’s mobile operators, ISPs and enterprise customers.

Exit mobile version