Telecoms equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent has opened up Africa’s most populous nation to the benefits of ultra-broadband connectivity by launching a superfast, 100 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic network with MTN Nigeria, a subsidiary of MTN Group and the leading service provider in Africa.
MTN Nigeria, which covers more than almost 90% of Nigeria’s land mass, will deploy a 100G network that re-uses existing 10G optical assets thereby preserving MTN past investments while ensuring future proof and state of art solution.
Nigeria’s growing economy is fueling a proliferation of mobile subscribers, which number about 275 to every one landline in the country.
Lynda Saint-Nwafor, CTO of MTN Nigeria said: “MTN realised we needed 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 met three main criteria: increased network reliability, a high degree of scalability to prepare the network for 400G and beyond, and preservation of our existing 10G 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.”
Hatim Zougari, country senior officer at 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.”
