TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd company, has secured a contract from connectivity and datacentre solutions provider MainOne to extend its active submarine cable system into West Africa's francophone region with two additional branches connecting Senegal (Dakar) and Cote D'Ivoire (Abidjan).

According to a media statement issued by the companies, these new branches will connect to MainOne's 7,000km cable system, which extends from Portugal to Nigeria, "and will inject new technology that upgrades the system to a potential capacity of 10TBps by November 2019 when the subsea system becomes operational."

With this development, MainOne will have landing points in five markets - Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cote D'Ivoire and Portugal, in addition to Cameroon.

The companies say francophone countries in West Africa, including Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania, continue to experience an increased demand for advanced telecom services and will benefit from the network extension into Cote D'Ivoire and Senegal.

Kazeem Oladepo, MainOne's regional executive for West Africa, said, "MainOne continues to lead the current digital transformation of the region by ushering in affordable connectivity to drive economic development. Our objective remains focused on bridging the digital divide between West Africa and the rest of the world. We have, and will continue to, invest significantly in projects to accelerate broadband access to help local businesses address the challenges they face procuring capacity at competitive rates. This extension of our subsea cable to Senegal and Cote D'Ivoire will further open up their international bandwidth markets, drive down costs and ultimately boost the economic and commercial development of the region."

Debbie Brask, vice president, project management of TE SubCom, added, "These MainOne enhancements bring two additional connectivity options to this rapidly growing region. MainOne has also selected SubCom's WSS ROADM technology to achieve dynamic capacity management in fulfilling the region's burgeoning demand."

The statement reads that the new branches will be equipped with TE SubCom's WSS ROADM technology that allows MainOne and its partners to match the capacity in each branch to the market need, thus optimising cable utilisation.

"SubCom will light the new branches with Ciena's transmission equipment, which enables this flexibility and higher capacity. It is also an industry first for the deployment of undersea spectrum-sharing in Africa."

The MainOne Submarine Cable System links West Africa with Europe and runs from Seixal in Portugal to Lagos in Nigeria.

The companies add that the system first went live in July 2010, becoming the first privately-owned subsea cable to bring open-access broadband capacity in West Africa.

In September 2018 French telecommunications firm Orange confirmed a major investment in MainOne to facilitate the construction and installation of two new branches and stations.

According to Orange, these will connect the cable to Dakar in Senegal and Abidjan in the Ivory Coast.