Globacom has signed a partnership with Huawei to build Glo2, a submarine cable that will run from Lagos to the South-South region of Nigeria.

The cable, which will be approximately 850km long and have a capacity of 12Tbps, will provide ultra-high speed connection to oil platforms and communities in the region.

Glo2 will complement the Glo1 international submarine cable built by Globacom in 2010 as the only one of its kind cable in Nigeria managed end-to-end, from Lagos to London, by one company.

Sanjib Roy, Regional Technical Director of Globacom, said the cable will provide fibre infrastructure for socio-economic growth.

Roy added that Glo2 will help cut traffic to Lagos, ensure new bandwidth (which has been stalled due to non-availability) for the transfer of a high volume of data from oil platforms to their onshore offices and enable SMEs to launch new applications - especially those who are into cloud businesses.

"I would say it is one of the most important events in the Nigerian telecom industry because of the fact that this is the first time a Nigerian-owned company is landing a submarine cable, which is the bedrock of telecom infrastructure within its country itself," said Roy .

"Because so far, we have got about five cable systems which are landing only in Lagos meaning that the whole of Nigeria has to aggregate their traffic to Lagos before they can go out of Lagos to the internet or outside countries where they have to go to exchanges for international calls."

He added that by virtue of the cable landing in the southern part of Nigeria, a new cachepoint is being created for people to aggregate their traffic and still use it as a redundant part for the fibre backbone.

He said that the new cable will link all the oil platforms in the Southern part of the Delta region and Globacom will provide the fibre directly from day one and connect using a process called branching.

With the increased data growth in the country across all the operators in the last year, Roy said Glo2 will meet a growing demand for connectivity.

Glo2 is expected to be completed in the next 18 months.

Glo1 cable is currently undergoing upgrade by Huawei to provide max capacity of 16Tbps from Nigeria to United Kingdom. Operation will be completed by end of May 2018.