West African network and internet solutions company MainOne this week announced the completion of an upgrade of its submarine cable network.

The company said its submarine cable network between Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal has been upgraded to a 100G wavelength system, and will expand its capacity to deliver high-bandwidth services.

MainOne's submarine cable system runs from Seixal in Portugal through Accra in Ghana to Lagos in Nigeria.

The company states that it has capacity to land branches in Morocco, Canary Islands, Senegal, and Ivory Coast.

"It has an upgradable capacity of over 10 terabits per second and when it first went live in July 2010, it became the first private subsea cable to bring open-access, broadband capacity to West Africa," it says.

Funke Opeke, Chief Executive Officer of MainOne said: "We are starting to see an information explosion in West Africa that has brought about a dramatic increase in network traffic this year and this has highlighted the need to scale up our network for future demand.

Opeke also disclosed that the upgrade was carried out using Xtera Nu-wave Optima optical networking platform and now targets its wholesale customers across West Africa.

"As a leading provider of data capacity to eight countries in West Africa, and with the pending integration of our NigerCam system to Cameroun and Nigeria's South-South region, we needed to deploy more advanced technology to reliably meet our customer's need for advanced and robust communications services. This upgrade to 100G provides MainOne the platform to further deepen broadband penetration in West Africa and meet the demands of our growing wholesale data business."

Jon Hopper, CEO of Xtera, said: "Xtera is extremely pleased to help MainOne upgrade its subsea cable infrastructure between Nigeria and Portugal. New capacity will be added during this upgrade by deploying our high-capacity, long-distance optical networking product, Nu-Wave OptimaTM."

He added, "The use of this advanced, field-proven multi-purpose platform will allow MainOne to introduce 100G services and support the development of digital economy in western Africa."