Meta, a tech giant, is planning to establish two submarine cables in Nigeria, connecting Lagos and Akwa Ibom by the end of November. These cables aim to significantly enhance Nigeria’s digital landscape and improve internet connectivity
1. Meta’s Initiative: Meta’s strategic plan involves the installation of submarine cables to bolster internet connectivity in Nigeria.
2. Location of Cables: The cables will connect in Lagos and Akwa Ibom, indicating the significance of these regions in Meta’s plan for expanded digital infrastructure.
3. Enhancing Internet Connectivity: These efforts align with the goal of enhancing internet services in Nigeria, catering to the growing need for improved connectivity.
4. Projected Timeline: Meta aims to complete the cable installations by the end of November, signifying a rapid implementation timeline for these developments.
The deployment of these submarine cables underscores Meta’s commitment to bolstering digital infrastructure in Nigeria, promising faster and more reliable internet connectivity, which will likely have substantial impacts on the country’s technological advancement.
Submarine cables are used to move large amounts of data by allowing different data streams in the form of multiple wavelengths of light to be sent simultaneously over a single fiber infrastructure. These cables are laid on the sea and ocean floor using cable-laying ships, which are specially designed seagoing vessels that can be over 500 feet (150 meters) long.
At present, some 500 submarine cables carry about 97 percent of global internet traffic, with the remaining 3 percent being serviced by satellites.
The cables are made up of optical fibers that transmit data in the form of light signals. The fibers are coated with layers of plastic and metal to offer strength and protection. The way data is transmitted through these cables is with the help of lasers that fire beams of light on one end of the cable at extremely high rates, which travel all the way to the other end and are registered by the receivers.
Meta’s Anjana submarine cable is set to run from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to Santander, Cantabria, will offer 480Tbps across 24 fiber pairs 1. The cable is expected to be operational in 2024.
The implication of Meta’s sub-marine (Fiber Optic) cable termination in Akwa Ibom State and Lagos is that those locations will serve as the launching hub for high-speed internet.
That means, once the cable terminates in those locations from the sea (Ocean belt), a physical internet infrastructure Powerhouse will be built in those locations, just like an electricity distribution company, where the internet will be sold in bulk to internet service providers (ISP). The providers, who already have telecommunications base stations, will then deploy the high-speed internet to their consumers.
There is a positive outlook to this, as 5G availability will be faster and coverage will be quicker.
From a business perspective, Meta wants to leverage Nigeria’s population. Nigeria, with about 250 million people, has over 150 million people with no internet access.
Impliedly, 150 million people in Nigeria are not in Meta’s ecosystem; this is where it makes economic sense for Meta to invest in onboarding that population on the internet through the landing of its internet sub-marine cables in Nigeria’s most strategic locations easily accessible by the Atlantic Ocean.
The greater the number of people on Meta’s platform, the greater its revenue.
Destiny Young, Technology Infrastructure and IT Engineer
