Glo 1 Lands in Lagos Today
•As Nigeria breaks telecoms record
09.05.2009

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History will be made in the Nigerian telecommunication industry today as Glo 1, the world's first submarine optic fibre cable to be built by a single individual company, lands in Lagos.
The 9,800km long cable which stretched from the UK across all the West African countries, will be anchored to its Landing Station at Alpha Beach, Lagos, this morning.
The trend in the global telecommunication industry is for a consortium of companies or even nations to combine resources to build submarine cables as was the case with the SAT submarine 3 cable which was built by a consortium of 36 countries.
The Group Chief Operating Officer, Globacom Limited, Jameel Mohammed said Glo 1 would deliver transmission capacity that would radically change Nigeria and West Africa's economic landscape by linking 17 countries to the rest of the world.
Jameel said the landing of Glo-1 was another milestone in the history of Nigeria’s communications industry, adding that the cable would provide unprecedented high speed internet services and make telecom services much faster, more reliable and cheaper for consumers.
Explaining the seeming delay in Glo-1’s arrival, the Globacom GCOO said that implementing submarine cable projects, particularly one spanning about 10,000 km from London to Lagos is an initiative that usually takes between two to two and a half years to complete.
Furthermore, he said that because the cable passed through various territorial waters and jurisdictions of several African countries, Globacom had to contend with lengthy approval processes.
“We needed permissions at many levels from all those countries to pass the cable through their territorial waters. We needed approval from security agencies, approvals from oil companies and from various bodies”, he said.He said Glo-1's current and upgradable capacity is enough to provide whatever broadband capacity Nigerians require for the next 15 to 20 years at the minimum projections.He disclosed that the telecoms giant had factored Nigeria's long term bandwidth requirements into the equation, adding that Glo 1 "can carry
voice traffic of all operators internationally. We can also provide IPLC (International Private Leased Circuit) for corporates”.

He said high quality work was done in deeply burying the underseacable in such a way that there would be little or no chance of disruptions.Glo 1 which also has a dedicated link to the U.S, will revolutionise the provision of telecoms services in West Africa with its quality, speed, reliability and affordability for individuals and corporate organisations.Jameel said the submarine optic fibre cable will also support applications like teleconferencing, distance learning, disaster recovery and telemedicine among several other benefits for Nigerians and the people of West Africa.