Alcatel-Lucent and MTN Nigeria have teamed up to deliver a superfast 100 Gb/s fibre-optic network based on MTN’s existing infrastructure across the West African country.
The pair would roll out the ultra-broadband network this year using existing telecommunication assets to preserve the more than $12-billion that MTN had injected into the network since 2001.
The network now covered 88.8% of Nigeria’s landmass, providing mobile services to 86.2% of the population across 223 cities and towns and 10 000 villages and communities.
The significant uptake of mobile subscribers in Nigeria, which now stood at about 275 to every one landline, fuelled the need for reliable, mobile broadband access to support growing demand for bandwidth-hungry services, such as video-streaming, and the increasing need for storage and data centre connections for enterprises.
“Alcatel-Lucent is supporting MTN Nigeria’s rapid growth in mobile subscribers by building a 100 Gb/s Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing / optical transport network using Alcatel-Lucent’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch platform, a family of equipment that has been designed according to the latest international soft-decision forward-error-correction, or SD-FEC zero touch photonics and coherent technology,” explained Alcatel-Lucent Nigeria country senior officer Hatim Zougari.
The new network would also provide MTN the capacity and flexibility to offer wholesale services to other service providers in the region.