Main One & Seacom win Best Pan African Initiative Awards
Main One and SEACOM, the only two privately funded and open-access based African submarine fibre optic cable systems, were awarded “Best Pan African Initiative”, at the AfricaCom Awards 2011 ceremony held in Cape Town, South Africa.
The award recognises an initiative taken by an organisation or a group of organisations to improve telecommunications services at the regional or continental level.
Commenting on the awards, Main One Chief Executive Officer, Funke Opeke, said, “through this partnership, Main One and SEACOM have extended their individual cable systems to the opposite coasts of Africa without the efforts required to construct brand new routes”.
“The ability to connect the east and west coast of the continent directly results in improved thorough put but also provides a system around most of the continent which provides improved redundancy for telecommunications operators.”
SEACOM’s Chief Executive Officer, Mark Simpson, said: “we are honoured to be recognised once again for our efforts in continuously extending pan-African connectivity by investing in infrastructure, products and services that meet the continent’s insatiable demand for bandwidth”.
“This partnership shows our determination to find viable ways to extend our system with partners who share our vision of building the African Internet on an open and equitable basis,” he said.
In May this year, the two companies announced that, they had interconnected their west and east African cable systems to launch capacity services from PoP to PoP, from a STM-1 level and above.
This partnership extended the Main One and SEACOM networks to create a system that offers connection between any SEACOM and Main One PoPs all around Africa.
Now in its fourth year, the awards are a serious recognition of the commitment and professionalism of these finalists to their core business and to changing the landscape of the continent, for the better.
The ceremony forms part of the AfricaCom conference, a pan-African communications event now in its 14th year, which is attended by leading African operators, service providers, ministries, regulators and equipment and solutions providers in Africa.
Main One is the first submarine cable company offering open access, wholesale broadband capacity in West Africa. This objective has been realised in a submarine cable system which commenced operations in July 2010 linking West Africa to the rest of the world via Portugal and the United Kingdom.
SEACOM is a privately financed, developed and owned submarine fibre optic cable network bringing high quality, affordable broadband capacity to Africa through the sale of wholesale international bandwidth and associated services on an open-access basis since July 2009.
Stretching some 17,000 kilometres along the eastern and southern African coastlines and onwards to India and Europe, the SEACOM system has already connected many African countries including South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Djibouti and Ethiopia bringing in many instances previously unavailable access to unrestricted bandwidth.
Source: GNA