Alcatel-Lucent is preparing to open up Africa’s most populous nation to the benefits of ultra-broadband connectivity by launching a 100 gigabit-per-second fibre-optic network with MTN Nigeria.
MTN Nigeria, which covers more than almost 90 percent 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. As a result, Nigeria has a significant need for reliable, mobile broadband access to support growing demand for bandwidth hungry services such as streaming video plus the ever-increasing need from enterprises for storage and data centre connections.
According to both parties involved: “The new network also gives MTN the capacity and flexibility to offer wholesale services to other service providers in the region.”
Alcatel-Lucent is supporting MTN Nigeria’s rapid growth in mobile subscribers by building a 100G DWDM/OTN network using Alcatel-Lucent’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) platform, a family of equipment that has been designed according to the latest international SD-FEC zero touch photonics and coherent technology.
According to Alcatel-Lucent, the Agile Optical Networking combines WDM, OTN, and GMPLS/ASON control plane intelligence to assure scalable, versatile, reliable and efficient transport at 100G and beyond.
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 oof Alcatel-Lucent in Nigeria, stated that: “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.”
Staff Writer
