More Nigerians need to use mobile phones, Internet – Coleman

Chief Technical Officer, Main One Cable Company, Mr. Johnnie Coleman
| credits: File copy

Chief Technical Officer, Main One Cable Company, Mr. Johnnie Coleman, tells STANLEY OPARA why he thinks the number of Nigerians using mobile phones and the Internet is small

Main One started business in Nigeria in 2010. Currently, what share of the market are you controlling in Nigeria, in terms of capacity?

When we first started selling capacity in Nigeria in 2010, the price of capacity was quite high, so the smaller businesses were unable to afford such capacity. Part of our policy is to try to enable increased usage of the capacity, so we have been able to bring prices down by at least 80 per cent since we joined the market in 2010. Our growth has been 300 per cent since we started in 2010. So, yes we have expanded tremendously, but exactly what percentage of the market is difficult to ascertain, because you will have to ask our customers.

All I will say is, our expansion plan over the next five years will see us at least taking 30 per cent of the wholesale and enterprise market place. With Nigeria, it’s not so much about today’s capacity, it’s about being able to reach others not experiencing this capacity. So for us, it is about reaching more towns, terrestrially, to bring more people into the 21st Century. We have over 160 million people in Nigeria and we know that there is only about 15 per cent reach in that number of people, currently either able to be on a mobile phone or use internet services, so that has got to change and we are certainly one company that is striving to make that change.

With the prevailing operating environment in Nigeria characterised by power supply downtimes, cable cuts and so on, what have you put in place to ensure 100 per cent uptime in your service?

Today, we have a lot of the end-product, and it started from planning. A lot of planning was done by well-seasoned people. For instance, our Business Development Manager, Mr. Bernard Logan, has about 25 years of submarine cable experience. I have about 20 years of telecoms, interconnection and Internet service provider experience, and the Chief Executive Officer of course comes with a wealth of experience, which cuts across critical segments of the business.

We picked very good partners, we spent a lot of time planning to make sure that every ‘t’ and ‘i’ was crossed and dotted to make sure that our planning was effective. Then, managing the execution, making sure that people could deliver on time, external relationships. All these played an essential role in putting this together.

So, the combination of all this, the design, the perfection of execution, the great team we have, the teamwork and partnership with external bodies, the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, Navy, port authorities and other agencies, have all come together to make sure that we are able to deliver the kind of uptime we built into this network. It’s by no means an easy task, but when you have a good team, you are able to do such.

So much has gone into this project in terms of money, human capital and other resources. So, what maintenance culture has been put in place to ensure that this investment is protected and sustained for a very long time?

We started off with a good level of expertise and team, and as the company has expanded its systems, it is clear we need people at all levels. We weren’t able to find the expertise locally. So, having found people that were competent in whatever they were doing at the time but didn’t know enough about telecoms or subsea systems, we trained them in America, Nigeria and Ghana. What we have now in Lagos is a network operations centre with a fully trained team; it is replicated in Ghana as well.

They work on a 24/7 basis every day of the week. If a fault occurs, it’s captured electronically and administered by humans to make sure what the fault is, and we also have contracts with the original suppliers, to provide our people with the support internationally, should that be required during an anomaly. So, it’s a matter of building in resilience to the network, as much as training of those individuals controlling them.

Also, we have signed up for long-term maintenance contracts with some of our key vendors, like Alcatel. Our Business Development Manager has personally worked with Alcatel and Tyco, who are the two biggest submarine cable vendors in the industry.

So, with a lot of push, today, we have a vessel close by such that we’ve shortened the time that it takes for repairs. In previous instances, it was that a ship had to come out from South Africa, Europe, and that process was going to take a week, and another week for repairs, and so on.

We ensure that we have the maintenance culture backed by our partners. We ensure that they are able to support us, that we have spares on hand. In some of these cases, for example, we have experts who are in America or Europe, who we make sure have visas valid for Nigeria, so that if they need to come in to provide support to the local team, they are able to get on a flight and come in. So these are some of the levels we have in terms of procedures to ensure that we are able to run this network efficiently.

What are the security measures put in place for the security and protection of the physical cable infrastructure?

The submarine is buried under the water and the Automatic Identification System that we have put in place allows us monitor up to 40 nautical miles or beyond of all our shore ends – Portugal, Lagos and Accra. These systems are able to detect vessels when they come in. We have also worked with legislators and other authorities to have a path that is protected for our cable at anchor zones. We also have with Tyco, one of our suppliers, a backup monitoring where they also sit 24/7 in North America, providing backup support in this regard.

For our terrestrial cable, we have route patrols and have teamed up with the security authorities locally, the police, community watchdogs in terms of where the infrastructure passes through communities, empowering the youths and giving them an opportunity to make a living by giving them some work to do. So, they look after our cables at the times we are not there. We go on routine patrols at least three times a week, taking pictures, looking at our infrastructure, looking at our environment, knowing if things are changing, whether people are constructing or doing anything that will bring external aggression to our systems, and this is how we are able to keep a watchful eye on these infrastructure.

If there is a cable system failure, what measures have been put in place to ensure that we still have some level of connectivity within that period?

We do a couple of different things; obviously having a major disaster like a cable breaking hasn’t happened to us at all, but a cable has broken on land and therefore, you gain experience on what to do. We have practices whereby we simulate a fault of a cable break happening, then monitor how they would use the written processes that we have already taught them, both to restore services and initiate a repair.

So, these things happen regularly and we build them, as they say, without telling them before hand. There is nothing more than being prepared for a break today, and therefore, you are sitting there waiting for it at 2pm. We would monitor that and retrain when required, or change our procedures if it was found that it was not an efficient way of working in the actual simulated form. So that’s one area we undertake.

We have demonstrated to some of our fellow cable operators our ability to restore their services by providing them with alternative connectivity over our submarine cable systems, and that has led to reciprocal restorative agreements. This has allowed us to be able to also utilise their infrastructure to restore critical services that run on our network, in case of the unlikely event of such failure.