Though internet penetration in Africa is currently at 27.7%, lower than the world average of 49.6% and despite challenges the continent faces with the high cost of service delivery, lack of infrastructure, limited skills, retail mobile data traffic continues to grow at rates up to 145% year over year in Nigeria and shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
This demand is predicted to grow across the continent by at least 41% annually and MainOne continues to position to enable this growth through infrastructure investments across West Africa. With service delivery today in nine countries; Nigeria, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Togo, Cameroun, Benin, Niger and Chad, MainOne has in recent years increased the capacity on its international submarine cable system with an upgrade from a 10G to a 100G wavelength system. This upgrade provides MainOne the capability to offer higher capacity bandwidth to its wholesale customers in West Africa, and guarantees highly reliable connectivity to support the growing demand for Internet access and bandwidth-intensive applications such as e-commerce, social media and electronic banking and payment services via 3/4G mobile networks.
With the rapidly growing population, upwardly mobile workforce, stabilizing political environments, increasing data demand in the continent is also driving demand for colocation services to reduce latency for the most demanding applications. Funke Opeke, Chief Executive Officer of MainOne stresses that “We are starting to see an information explosion in West Africa that has brought about a dramatic increase in network traffic and this has highlighted the need to scale up network and local hosting capabilities.
MainOne owns and operates the region’s premier Tier III data center, MDXi – a 600 rack facility that is the the most interconnected data center in West Africa, with access to all the submarine cables and major network operators in West Africa, and Internet Exchanges including London, Amsterdam, Nigeria and Ghana. MDXi provides the world class quality of service expected by multinational companies and is certified by the Uptime institute, ISO 9001, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS for payment systems.
MainOne has remained at the forefront of broadband growth in West Africa with its growing investments in infrastructure across the region. In its seven years of operation, the company has established a strong reputation as the preferred provider of connectivity and data center solutions for regional telecom operators and global content providers seeking direct access to subscribers on the sub-Continent.
