Globacom Plans Alternative to SAT-3
Launches international switches in 5 continents
By Okechukwu Kanu
Nigeria's second national operator (SNO), Globacom Limited, yesterday announced plans to build a high-speed submarine optical fibre link to address long-term bandwidth requirements and current traffic trends in the country. When completed, the proposed Globacom high capacity (32 STM64) link will act as an alternative to the SAT-3 optical fibre submarine linking Africa with the rest of the world and championed by South African fixed line operator, Telkom. It will carry long distance traffic from Nigeria to the United Kingdom and distribute such traffic to other parts of the world, resulting in greatly improved international call voice quality and high speed data transmission.
At a news conference in Lagos yesterday, Globacom's Executive Director, Mr. Paddy Adenuga, said the planned infrastructure is a strategy to make the company the leading provider of gateway services to operators in Nigeria and the entire West African sub-region.
Globacom's present commitment, he said, is in tandem with its plans to establish international gateway switches in five continents. Already the switches in Europe including a switch in London, points of presence in France and Germany are already in operation. He said work is ongoing on those in the United States of America, Singapore and Hong Kong in Asia, the United Arab Emirate in the Middle East and Australia.
Adenuga said the company now has interconnection agreements with major international carriers including Belgacom of Belgium, Link Africa and KPN Eurovoice of Netherlands, France Telecom, IDT Global and Cable and Wireless of UK, iBasis of USA, T-Systems of Germany and Teleglobe of Canada.
According to him, the facilities will enable the network to directly interconnect other leading international carrier service providers, provide quality hubbing service for other operators in the world and terminate and aggregate quality traffic directly from Nigeria to the rest of the world.
Adenuga said Globacom has been able to resolve its initial dispute with rival public operator, the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) over access to SAT-3 adding that, "we now both have equal access on an equal and cordial basis as we as well as NITEL now use it to carry our international traffic."
With the investments in its gateway operations, Globacom is eyeing a potentially lucrative long distance niche of carrying one billion minutes of international calls within the next one year with the Nigerian market accounting for 350 million minutes while providing the hub service for other international carriers.
In his presentation at the conference, the chief operating officer of Glo Gateway, Mr. Ashok Israni, announced that the company now offers international SMS to 547 destinations in 152 countries across the globe.
Adenuga listed Globacom's other market head starts as the first in the introduction of "Pay by the Second"; introduction of premium pack on the prepaid platform with rates like a contract line; and introduction of special rates for 'Friends & Family'.
According to him, Glo Mobile was also first to offer through its MagicPlus package, a comprehensive bouquet of information services on a phone browser; first to implement a 2.5 G network in Nigeria; first to offer multi-media messaging service; first to connect over a million subscribers in less than nine months and first to kick-off a major initiative of extensive optical fibre connectivity across Nigeria.
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