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Suburban West Africa, a next generation telecom carrier, is underscoring its growing influence in Nigeria’s telecom industry with plans to expand its provision of network backbone infrastructure and other services, following the near collapse of national carrier, NITEL. The plans come as the firm celebrates 10 years of operations, which first began in Nigeria but has now spread across West Africa and Europe. Suburban’s master stroke came a little over a year ago with the negotiation of a contract which enabled it extend the Republic of Benin landing of the Sat-3 fibre-optic submarine cable to Nigeria. By this feat, Suburban West Africa became a parallel nation carrier, while NITEL, the official national carrier maintained some semblance of business. As NITEL’s troubled privatisation saw it going virtually comatose, Suburban blossomed and became the saving grace to telcos and other businesses such as banks, which are heavily dependent on huge data services. Today, Suburban provides carrier services to practically all other Nigerian telecom firms as well as the nation’s 24 banks. At the company’s 10th year anniversary dinner in Lagos on Wednesday night, Bruce Ayonote, managing director and CEO remarked: “We carry voice, video and data traffic domestically, within the region and internationally by connecting our customers with services; services with networks; and networks with each other. “Suburban is playing a significant role in the growth of internet penetration in West Africa by increasing the wholesale internet connectivity in Nigeria by over 800 percent over the last two years”. All this, he said is despite the fact that he and his partners, then fresh out of school, had struggled to raise the money to register the company. “We are no longer just a Nigerian company. Our business has grown beyond the shores of our country and we are now actively engaged in and exploring opportunities in other markets as well. Through our partnerships and investments in technologies such as MPLS, we can now connect our customers to over 220 global cities. “As West Africa’s favourite IP backbone provider, we are constantly setting new objectives and exceeding them as well”. Going down memory lane, Ayonote recalled: “It started from a very humble beginning through entrepreneurship flair. “We had to borrow $100 to add to the $100 we had, so we could incorporate the company. It cost N25,000 then to incorporate the company – myself and Sulaiman didn’t even have N25,000 to incorporate the company. “But after the incorporation, it started to grow organically. We started before the liberalisation of the telecom industry. So, the only space available was serving the incumbent – NITEL. Then, we also served some others. We served them with supplies of supporting equipment and consumables. “Shortly after that, we started doing business planning and researching the market. We basically switched to policy and saw the liberalisation. But we saw gaps in infrastructure – in the event of success of the liberalisation “We saw an opportunity for an infrastructure service provider, which we took advantage of. At that point, just being able to conceptualise and plan was very valid