This is according Managing Director of Alvarion Southern Africa and Nigeria, Winston Smith.
Already, about 11 submarine cables, including (SEAS, SAT-3/SAFE, SEACOM, TEAMs,EASSy, LION, LION2, GLO-1, Main One, WACS, and ACE are presently in the continent.
Smith says this was due to the huge costs involved in bringing fibre optic cables inland to service African countries.
He stressed that operators must collaborate with governments at all levels to ensure that the various investments put into the various submarine cables in the continent gets value for their money.
Five of the 11 cables are situated in West Africa, four of the five cables in West Africa are all live while the fifth one, Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), is slated to be ready for service (RFS) by quarter two of 2012.
Smith, however, listed a number of new projects planned to commence in 2011 that will help to reverse this trend and help Africa to benefit from increased Internet access and bandwidth.
Smith says O3b Networks is the developer of a new fibre-quality, satellite-based global Internet backbone for telecommunications operators and Internet service providers serving the emerging markets.
The company has raised a total of $1.2-billion to launch its first satellites, which will provide low-latency, fibre-quality Internet connectivity between developing markets and the global Internet infrastructure.
He noted that this will potentially allow billions of people who have so far been poorly served or completely cut off from the Internet have access to the greatest business and information resource of our time.
He also informed that Alvarion was also focused on expanding its operations on the African continent this year.
In 2010 much work was done around migrating customers from the fixed WiMAX 802.16D solution to the new mobile WiMA 802.16E solution. Smith says his company deployed a network in Nigeria with the operator Mobitel on its 4G platform, providing full mobile solutions for its customers.
By: Bimbo Omitooki – Senior ICT Journalist
