In June this year, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) confirmed that it had awarded an operation to Starlink, an internet satellite constellation operated by SpaceX. The company, which is owned by South African billionaire Elon Musk, aims to be a leading internet service provider (ISP) in the country.
Starlink was granted a 10-year international operational gateway licence and a five-year ISP approval by the NCC to commence operations in Nigeria. But Elon Musk is faced with the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed – an existing ISP provider in Nigeria owned by a certain Funke Opeke.
Funke Opeke is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Main One Cable Company, one of Africa’s top communications organisations with a presence on two continents and across Africa.
The company boasts of a huge submarine communications cable that stretches from Portugal in Europe to South Africa and distributives to other countries in Africa. However, the turning point for the company came on 28 April 2008, when it awarded a turnkey supply contract to Tyco Telecommunications to enable it to facilitate the Main One Cable System across the African continent.
According to reports, the cable system spans 14,000km in distance. It provides an additional capacity for the provision of international Internet connectivity to all the countries between Portugal and South Africa along the western coast of Africa.
The project, which consisted of a state-of-the-art submarine cable, was in two phases and projected to be commissioned in May 2010 – it was. Currently, phase one of the project, which provided a dual fiber pair of 1.28-Tbit/s from the DWDM project, connects Nigeria, Ghana, and Portugal. It also has the capacity to offer onward connections into other parts of Europe, Asia, and America. The second phase, which was an extension of the already laid 6,900 kilometers cable, extended into Angola and South Africa.
Who is Funke Opeke?
Born in 1961, the Forbes 2018 World’s Top 50 Women in Tech was born and brought up in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. She attended Queens School (girls only) in Ibadan, and Obafemi Awolowo University, where she obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering. She would later travel to the United States, where she obtained a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University.
After her education, she worked in the United States for twenty years in the ICT sector before returning back to Nigeria with a dream of solving the telecommunication problem in Nigeria. To better understand the challenges the country faced, she joined NITEL – where she discovered that the absence of satellites was the major problem the country faced.
In 2018, she raised $240 million and commenced the actualization of her dreams by laying a 4,400 miles of fiber optic cables from Portugal to Nigeria through the Main One Cable Company.
The success of the company has been linked to the entrepreneurial tenacity of Funke Opeke, whom many critics and business analysts have described as someone with a never-say-die attitude. She has been able to maintain a spot at the top when it comes to communications in Africa. Within the past decade, she has contented herself with other big players in the industry, such as the multinational operators of ACE, ATLANTIS-2, GLO-1, SAT-2, SAT-3/WASC, WACS, etc., and remains unscratched.
Matching Head to Head to Elon Musk
There is no doubt that in considering the decision to make an entry into the West African market and Nigeria in general, Elon Musk and his team have discussed Funke Opeke. She is a titan who is capable of matching Elon Musk toe to toe.
Not only does she have an enviable wealth of experience capable of dwarfing anyone in the ICT space, but she is also an engineer – like Elon Musk. So, Elon would not be dealing with an ICT investor. Rather, he would have to compete with an engineer like himself who is highly experienced.
Another area in which Funke and the Main One Cable Company have an advantage is in the area of cost. According to the SpaceX website, the company currently sells its ISP starter kits for about $500 and pegs monthly subscription at $110. Main One offers its services for far less, and it would be interesting to see how they plan on battling Funke Opeke for market share in West Africa.
Funke Makes a Smart Move on the Chess Board
Elon Musk made the first move on the chess board in early 2021 when he announced his decision to bring Starlink into Nigeria. Many stakeholders in the country feared the worst because not only would they have to deal with competing with the wealthiest man on the planet, they had to deal with a genius like Elon Musk.
But it appears that if there was anyone who peed in their pants at the news, it certainly wasn’t Funke Opeke. Reacting to what was obviously going to be a big competition, Funke made a deal with Equinix, a U.S. multinational company that specialises in providing ISPs and data centers.
The move significantly increases the capacity of Main One Cable Company to match any threats that the entry of Starlink into Nigeria would pose. As part of the partnership, Funke would receive $320 million in cash and also continue as the company’s CEO.
Smart move, don’t you think? What are your thoughts? Share your comments in the session below.
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