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MainOne aims to double $300m investment

By on July 2, 2015

MainOne said on Tuesday it was looking at doubling its current investment of over $300m in infrastructure to improve broadband connectivity and data centre services in West Africa in the next five years.

The company stated that this was in spite of the challenges being faced in the sub region’s telecommunications sector, including the dearth and high cost of infrastructure.

Despite having invested $300m in its first five years of operation, the company said the projected additional investment was possible given the future prospects in the broadband market.

“Such prospects have the capacity of making us double our investments as we extend our network into more countries in the sub region,” the Chief Executive Officer, MainOne, Ms. Funke Opeke, said at a press briefing in Lagos on Tuesday on the company’s fifth anniversary, which comes up today (Wednesday).

She said the company was spurred to keep investing given the “urgent need” to bridge the digital divide in West Africa and to become the preferred provider of wholesale Internet services and enabler of online businesses within the sub region.

Opeke said, “And we will keep investing, especially when we consider that we have good capital based on our track record. While we are investing, we are determined to remain consistent in our resolve to bridging the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the world.

“The company will ensure that its services are reliable and highly available to its customers. We will also ensure that the customers continue to experience zero downtime on our core submarine cable infrastructure.”

The Chief Financial Officer, MainOne, Mr. Babatunde Dada, said that the firm had plans to build more data centres in the country to complement the MDX-I already functioning in Ajah area of Lagos.

Dada said the data centres would be built in Badagry, Sagamu, Abuja and Port Harcourt.

He said the company’s data centre was Tier III certified by the Uptime Institute and that MainOne would have obtained the highest certification of Tier IV but for the infrastructure challenge in the country.

Dada said, “We are, however, working on modalities to build a Tier IV certified data centre soon to aid connectivity to other West African countries. While we work on that, we have built 7,000 kilometres of submarine cable carrying over one terabyte of data from London through Portugal to Lagos and almost 300 kilometres of metro fibre across the country and we have a cloud platform, which we are working on.

“With the submarine cable and facilities we have on ground, we are able to deliver services to over 350 corporate customers. We service all the telecommunications companies in the country. We equally service 16 out of the 23 commercial banks in the country.”

 

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