Global communications giant Alcatel-Lucent has been contracted by MTN Nigeria to deploy ultra-broadband network to boost its connectivity in the West Africa country.
Alcatel-Lucent will undertake a network transformation by deploying ultra-broadband 100G fibre-optic data network in Africa’s most populous nation.
The deployment will see Nigeria benefit from ultra-broadband connectivity by launching a superfast, 100 gigabit-per-second fibre-optic network with MTN Nigeria, a subsidiary of Dubai-based MTN Group and the leading service provider in Africa.
The transformation is expected to benefit the country with 275 mobile subscribers for every landline with an economy that relies on fast, dependable, high-capacity mobile broadband access.
“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,” said Lynda Saint-Nwafor, CTO of MTN Nigeria.
Lynda added the company wanted a state of the art solution that met three main criteria that are increased network reliability, a high degree of scalability to prepare the network for 400G and beyond, and preservation of our existing 10G investment, which Alcatel-Lucent showed it could meet.
MTN Nigeria, which covers more than almost 90 per cent of Nigeria’s land mass and is the biggest mobile operator in the country with more than 58 million subscribers, 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.
“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,” observed Hatim Zougari, Country Senior Officer of Alcatel-Lucent in Nigeria.
Nigeria’s growing economy is fuelling a proliferation of mobile subscribers, which number about 275 to every one landline in the country.
As a result, the country 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.

http://africabusiness.com/2014/10/14/mtn-nigeria-2/

ok