Yesterday, the news hit the interwebs about Airtel Bharti’s partnership agreement with Liquid Telecom. The details of the partnership will allow Airtel piggyback on Liquid Telecom’s terrestrial fibre network to deliver faster internet speeds across all their 3G and 4G networks.
Basically, anywhere Liquid’s infrastructure is present, Airtel can deliver insane broadband speeds to their customers. I was excited when I read this news until it dawned on me – Liquid Telecom is not in Nigeria.
Ever the Sherlock Holmes, I decided to do a little scouting to see if there were any companies with a terrestrial fibre network in Nigeria. Turns out Nigeria has about 41,000 kms of the fibre stuff. These are some of the companies that own it.
1. Main One
Landed in 2010, covers over 7,000 km distance from London, with initial landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal.
2. Globacom – Glo 1
Landed the shores of Nigeria in 2009, with a capacity of 640 Gbit/s, covers a distance of 10,000 km from Lagos to UK, connecting 17 African and European countries.
3. Suburban Telecoms
Almost 3,500 km of fibre optic cables in Nigeria.
4. Multi-Links
Has a terrestrial fibre optic network spanning 8,232 km in Nigeria.
5. MTN – West African Cable System
Commenced operation in 2011 and has links from Europe, West Africa and South Africa, with bandwidth capacity of over 5.12 Terabytes (Tbps) and spanning a distance of 14,530 km.
Airtel seems to be willing. The infrastructure is here. Let’s make this happen guys.
Photo Credit: HelloImNik via Compfight cc
