MainOne

MainOne is a Nigerian digital infrastructure company founded in 2010 by Funke Opeke to expand the internet backbone available to West Africa. Its original mission was to build and operate an open-access submarine fibre cable linking West Africa to Europe, then extend that capacity through terrestrial fibre and data centre infrastructure in Nigeria and Ghana.

Its significance comes from the market it disrupted. Before MainOne, international connectivity in West Africa relied heavily on a small number of undersea cable systems, which limited capacity and kept broadband prices high. That bottleneck constrained the growth of internet-dependent businesses, cloud services, and digital platforms across the region. MainOne helped change that by creating a more competitive infrastructure layer and making bandwidth more widely available on an open-access basis.

The company did not stop at submarine cable infrastructure. It also built terrestrial fibre networks and developed a major data centre footprint in Nigeria, helping turn raw international bandwidth into usable digital infrastructure for enterprises, telecom operators, and service providers. That broader build-out made MainOne more than a cable company; it became a foundational part of West Africa’s internet ecosystem.

MainOne’s open-access model was especially important because it allowed other operators and businesses to connect into the network rather than forcing them to build parallel infrastructure from scratch. That improved efficiency and lowered barriers to market entry, which matters in a region where infrastructure duplication can be expensive and slow to scale.

The company’s acquisition by Meta in 2022 marked a major milestone in the evolution of Africa’s digital infrastructure landscape. It signaled the strategic importance of the assets MainOne had built and the role those assets now play in supporting cloud, content, connectivity, and data-heavy services across the region.

Overall, MainOne is best understood as one of the companies that fundamentally changed the economics of internet infrastructure in West Africa. Its legacy is not just the cable itself, but the broader ecosystem of fibre and data-centre capacity it helped make possible.