Expresso ready for data boom with ACE launch

Managing Director of Expresso Ghana, El Amir Ahmed El Amir said the company is now poised to play a major role in the expected data boom in Ghana and West Africa because it has landed its own huge capacity submarine cable in the sub-region.

He told Adom Business within the next three to five years, there is an expected boom in data consumption across West Africa and Ghana for that matter, so Expresso made a 20-year-long investment in the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) submarine cable to position itself for that data boom.

“Mainly our focus here in Ghana will be to provide data services and connectivity directly to our customers and also through our collaboration with other telcos and ISPs… and our role will be in line with the government’s determination to increase internet penetration from 5% to 20%,” he said.

Mr. El Amir was speaking in an interview with Adom Business at the Ghana launch of the ACE submarine cable, which stretches from France to South Africa with landing sites in five West African countries, including Ghana.

The US$700million 17,000km-long cable connects 23 countries and it is owned by a consortium of 19 companies, including Expresso-Dolphin, a partnership of the Expresso Group and Dolphin International.

ACE comes to Ghana as the second largest on the West-African coast, with 5.12terabits/second capacity, to add to the country’s huge capacity of redundant fibre optic capacity from the MTN’s WACS, Globacom’s Glo One, Vodafone’s SAT-3 and the independently-owned Main One.

Some industry players have questioned the rationale for Expresso landing another submarine cable in Ghana, particularly because it has not been doing so well with its customer drive for years now.

But El Amir said ACE would enable Expresso to improve the quality of its own services and also provide other telcos and ISPs the opportunity of diverse routes, better quality of service and even lesser cost of data capacity.

“We did not bring ACE for only Expresso Ghana – we brought it for the other telcos and ISPs as well as enterprise customers – and very soon you will see the benefits in terms of quality of service, diversity of routes, and even in terms of cost of bandwidth,” he said.