By Telcables Nigeria, powered by the global Angola Cables network, Africa’s leading carriers’ carrier have set the stage for the January take-off of a Central Bank of Nigeria new policy framework designed to boosts operations of local operators but with a rejig of business.
Accordingly, Telcables Nigeria Limited, yesterday in Lagos, unveiled a strategic blueprint that will galvanises and set a new trend in the industry, promising to bring data protection in various levels as well as cloud nodes to the local country, while also bringing software solutions, AI to the local industry.
At a press conference cum lunch hosted by the Chief Executive Officer of Telcables Nigeria, Mr Fernando Fernandes alongside the Vice President of ICT in the Angola Telcables Group, Mr Julio Gabriel Chilela, Fernandes, revealed that Telcables have installed two cloud nodes locally that have been running and already certified by Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC).
The press parley was meant to discuss Nigeria’s digital future and what businesses need to operate in the age of AI.
According to Fernandes, Telecables’ cloud solution comes with international certifications such as ISO, SOC 1, SOC 2, as well as what the military at all levels needs adding that “we have launched in TechExpo the Go4EI. It’s a new product that we are launching in the market that is basically a market for GPUs. Because today, as soon as you write something on chat GPT, that information is captured by those companies.”
He said, “And we are part of this ecosystem and we are ready to address, not to address, but welcome all these major companies to partnership and to provide them the resilience and the service that they need to do that.”
He disclosed that Telcables Nigeria doesn’t charge for the traffic between the customer and the nodes, even when all the international companies do that adding that “we have a DDoS solution in our systems, so that can protect against many attacks, and believe me, telecom companies have a lot of attacks.”
Speaking further, he said that Angola Cable owns subsea assets, such as the submarine cables, “and we are part of the consortium on West Africa Cable System (WACS). WACS is the cable that goes through South Africa up to Europe, that’s attached to some of the countries in the west coast of Africa. So, we’re going to Lisbon, our main point, and London.”
He added: “We have also 100% of our cable, and that is the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) that crosses the Atlantic. The SACS cable that crosses the south of the Atlantic, connecting Africa to Latin America, to Brazil. And we have also some pairs of fibres in the Monet that connect Brazil to the United States.”
According to him, Angola Cables is in four continents with its own assets stressing “and here in Nigeria, we implemented last year our network. We have basically fibre running through the major data centres here, that you already know, such as RACK Centre, Digital Reality, Equinix, 21st Century, up to the CLS.
“So, we have create a ring where everybody in all these data centres are connected. With that, Telcables is present in the Nigerian market. We are delivering connectivity that is becoming even more common in those days.”
He disclosed that Telcables Nigeria now delivers services to operators, ISPs, and as well as to some of the biggest companies in the market adding “Besides that, we also installed two cloud nodes locally.”
Also taking questions from journalists, Vice President of ICT at the Angola Telcables Group, Julio Gabriel Chilela stated: “our vision is to continue to bring infrastructure needed so that the local data protection stakeholders will be comfortable in creating more rules and trust. As a company, that with those kinds of responsibilities, we can actually secure the market.”
While noting that one of the big concerns of governments and institutions for creating new laws is for infrastructure, he assured that Telcables can train models to create a call centre that every information is attended to by AI and all the information in that call centre stays local.
He added, “So, anything you want to get your ID, you call this call centre number and you can get the answer from an AI agent that can talk to you. But be assured that all the information is in the country. This is one of the examples for a public infrastructure.”
Speaking on customer support, he said: “We offer a 3.9 SLA availability. So, you have assurance that you have a 9.99% of availability.
“And about the customer support, we have been, as the CEO said, a local cloud for three years already. And we have matured our business during this time. And we know how the market behaves, what they need. And we have prepared the structure to attend to this demand. We have a team in different level. We don’t just have the customer support.
“We have people, engineers of level one, that will talk to the customer. The level two, which actually see what’s going on. We have engineers that will take care of the infrastructure. We have an observability area inside of the company. Just to observe all the services running to offer assurance to the customer.”
