LAGOS – Alcatel-Lucent, Paris on Tuesday said that it would be partnering with MTN Nigeria to inject 100 gigabit-per-second fibre-optic network to boost broadband in the country.
In a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos, the company said that this partnership would result in a high capacity mobile broadband access.
“MTN Nigeria, which covers almost 90 per cent of Nigeria’s landmass, will deploy a 100Gb network that re-uses existing 10Gb optical assets.
“This would thereby preserve MTN past investments while ensuring future proof and
state of art solution,’’ it said.
According to the statement, Nigeria’s growing economy is fueling a proliferation of mobile subscribers, which number about 275 to every one landline in the country.
It said that this upsurge in the growth of mobile users led to Nigeria’s need for reliable, mobile broadband access to support growing demand for bandwidth hungry services.
It enumerated some of the needs as streaming video and the ever-increasing need from enterprises for storage and data centre connections.
The statement added that the new network would give MTN the capacity and flexibility to offer wholesale services to other service providers in the region.
Lynda Saint-Nwafor, CTO, MTN Nigeria said: “MTN realised we need to upgrade our network to meet customer expectations for ultra-broadband connectivity and high reliability within Nigeria’s very competitive marketplace.
“We wanted a state-of-the-art solution that meets three main criteria: increased network reliability, a high degree of scalability to prepare the network for 400G and beyond, and preservation of our existing10G investment.
“Alcatel-Lucent’s demonstrations showed that they could meet all of our criteria and we look forward to deploying the network overlay in 2014,’’ Nwafor said.
Hatim Zougari, Country Senior Officer of Alcatel-Lucent in Nigeria, said: “We knew that MTN’s top priority was to provide reliability to their customers.
“But they also wanted to offer ultra-broadband and they wanted to retain usefulness of as much of their legacy network as possible.
“We were able to show that we can give them a cost-effective solution that accomplishes all of their goals in a way that no one else could. (NAN)
