Lagos — Globacom Limited, Nigeria's second national carrier has concluded arrangements to launch its 's submarine cable, Glo-1, which will link 16 African countries. It will start from Lagos to London and through a dedicated link on Apollo 2 to the United States of America.

Globacom officials who confirmed the story explained that with the increasing bandwidth requirement of Nigeria and West Africa, there is the urgennt need to address the problem.

The company said it is investing in Glo-1 Submarine cable project and revolutionise communication in the whole of Africa.

The project is made up of a trunk cable linking Nigeria (Lagos) and England (Bude) with Branching Units in Spain (Vigo), Portugal (Simsimbra), Morocco (Casablanca), Senegal (Dakar) Mauritania (Nouakchott) Sierra Leone (Freetown), Liberia (Monrovia), Togo (Lome), Cape Verde (Praia), Gambia (Bamjul) Guinea Bisau (Bisau), Guinea (Conakry) Cote d'Ivoire (Abidjan), Benin Republic (Cotonou), Ghana (Accra), Nigeria (Bonny).

It was also confirmed that the submarine link has a capacity for 32 channels with each channel holding 10 gigabits per second or STM 64 Dense Wavelength Division Multiplaxing.

This makes available tremendouscapacity for the three dimensional communication available in the -Voice, Data (internet/IP) and video.

At the moment, the only such facility in Nigeria is the 2 STM which hardly meets the growing communication needs of the country as the facility is shared by over 32 members and 16 countries in Africa.

This project being undertaken by Alcatel Submarine networks, the world's leading provider of cable infrastructure will connect West Africa to UK (with a dedicated capacity to the USA) on a 32 channel STM64 fibre optic cable capacity.