 |
| Broadband |
By Prince Osuagwu
Internet freaks in Nigeria who may be hoping for a direct business deal with frontline broadband access providers in Nigeria, Main One cable company, to enhance their broadband end use experience, may at the moment, still have to rely on the company’s resellers including major telecom operators and other ISPs.
This is as the company has reiterated its position not to go into retails even in the near future. In fact, the company revealed that going retail, was not even in its business strategy for now.
However, the good news is that not going retail for the company, does not mean that it would not monitor whether its broadband investment, rubs off positively on end users or employ strategies to create desired impact if expectant teeming Nigerians are not getting what would make them sing a new song.
Apparently to show seriousness in this regard, the cable company has decided to flag off a programme tagged Partner Advantage Programme, aimed at working with its partners to provide benefits capable of expanding existing businesses, creating new business opportunities and as well grow capacity for the company.
Part of the benefits of the programme, included that it would help the partners leverage on the existing and new infrastructure available to deliver capacity to collective customers, address complex last mile distribution business needs and address all requests for capacity subscriptions below 10Mbps.
In the over all, the programme is expected at the end to increase internet penetration in Nigeria. In common language, the programme is aimed at beating out ways of offering MainOne customers more reduced prices which they in turn would pass over to the end users.
Dropping the hint of the programme, MainOne’s Head, Marketing and Strategy, Mr Adebayo Oyewole noted that his company in its ten months operation in Nigeria, has discovered that prices of bandwidth which were expected to come down with the landing of the undersea submarine cable, were still high, adding that if nothing was done to check that, the expected gains of the investment would take time to come and eventually look like a fluke.
According to him, the programme may have the blessings of international giants like Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft among others.
According to Oyewole, this programme would see to a major reduction in data packages of the Nigerian telecom operators who are the main customers of the cable company and eventually rub-off positively on the scores of Nigerians hooked on their network services.
He also hinted that his company was going to launch its Internet Protocol, IP platform in July, to enable most of its customers who do not wish to buy an STM1 to also get better services directly from the company.
Although MainOne’s cable initiative has a total of 5terabytes capacity, Oyewole said that about 1.92 capacity has been built already, of which about 10 percent has already been let out in the last ten months.
....Strikes partnership with SEACOM on capacity for Nigeria, SA
In a similar development, the company has also partnered with a leading African cable operator, SEACOM in an effort that has resulted in interconnecting their West and East African Cable Systems to launch capacity services from one Point of Presence, PoP to another, from a STM-1 level and above.
This partnership extends the Main One and SEACOM networks to create a system that offers connection between any SEACOM and Main One PoPs all around Africa between South Africa and Nigeria.
An excited Funke Opeke, Main One CEO, said of the partnership: “While efforts to implement a physical cable between Nigeria and South Africa continue, we have joined our cables together in Europe to satisfy many of our customers’ immediate requirements for capacity between Nigeria and South Africa.”
The joint solution is provided on an open-access basis and is immediately available, providing customers with a timing advantage ahead of the completion of other planned systems around the African continent.
SEACOM CEO, Brian Herlihy said he held the view that “a ring-type system around the entire continent is the best way to attain adequate redundancy whilst offering customers a comprehensive connectivity solution. The announcement shows our determination to find a viable way to extend our system with partners who share our vision to build the African Internet.”
The SEACOM submarine fibre optic network system was launched on 23 July 2009. The cable network serves to directly connect South Africa and Eastern Africa with Europe and Southern Asia, covering a distance of over 17 000km worth of fibre optic technology.
No comments:
Post a Comment