Prince Osuagwu and Chinwe Uba
29 October 2008
WEST Africa's premier Next Generation Carrier, Suburban, last week said it has taken major steps to address the supply of internet bandwidth, which is the primary bottleneck affecting the penetration of internet services in Nigeria.
This is as the company is riding on the back of Cisco to make available a 10Gigabit connection into the global internet backbone, as well as conceptualizing the ISP Forum for the country.
Suburban also promised to open up further dialogue with Cisco on how additional solutions can be created to address other issues, in order to position Nigeria to meet the challenges of the new Internet boom and high broadband costs.
The company made the assertions recently in Lagos, as it launched the first Internet Service Providers Forum in Nigeria at the Eko Hotel and Suites.
Presenting the target of the forum to the public, CEO of Suburban, Mr. Bruce Ayonote, said that "the objective of the forum is to make the internet as accessible in Nigeria as it is anywhere else on the globe, in terms of quality, speed, price and availability.
The key to achieving this objective is to create a culture of collaboration between service providers that will be sustained for long term benefit. Internet Service Providers, as a gateway between the internet and the people, have a critical role to play in the socio-economic development of Nigeria. The internet is increasingly becoming a necessity in this present information age and Nigerians should have the opportunity to positively leverage this resource to our optimal benefit."
For him, Cisco was the obvious choice for a technology partner in executing this novel internet development strategy as eighty percent of internet traffic runs on Cisco technology. He added that Cisco have the expertise and technical know-how to add value to the collaborative effort as well as provide unequivocal business support that would be invaluable to all stakeholders.
Ayonote said that Suburban has been at the cutting edge of innovative technological solutions and has successfully built a fiber based Next Generation Network that spans the West Africa sub-region while providing global MPLS connectivity reach.
The company, he said, in its strategic relationship with Cisco, has partnered with other global connectivity and backbone providers to deliver a full compliment of voice, data and video solutions to West Africa's mobile operators, ISPs and enterprise customers.
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