TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company (although not for much longer), says it has won a contract to build a pair of new branches to the MainOne submarine cable system. The 7000-km MainOne undersea network runs from Portugal to Nigeria. TE SubCom will add branches to Senegal (at Dakar) and Cote D’Ivoire (at Abidjan).
The company also will add ROADM capabilities based on its wavelength-selective switch (WSS) technology as part of the upgrade that will benefit the submarine system as a whole. The project, which also will use optical transport equipment from Ciena, will upgrade MainOne’s potential capacity to 10 Tbps by November 2019.
“MainOne continues to lead the current digital transformation of the region by ushering in affordable connectivity to drive economic development. Our objective remains focused on bridging the digital divide between West Africa and the rest of the world. We have, and will continue to, invest significantly in projects to accelerate broadband access to help local businesses address the challenges they face procuring capacity at competitive rates,” said Kazeem Oladepo, MainOne’s regional executive for West Africa. “This extension of our subsea cable to Senegal and Cote D’Ivoire will further open up their international bandwidth markets, drive down costs and ultimately boost the economic and commercial development of the region.”
MaineOne went live in July 2010 with TE SubCom as the deployment contractor (see “Main One subsea, fiber-optic cable links West Africa to Europe”). It has been upgraded several times since then (see, for example, “MainOne chooses Xtera for 100-Gbps submarine network upgrade”).
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