Fiber optics project links Upstate & Africa

It is an illustration of an economy that increasingly makes the global local and the local global.

The hundreds of miles of cable for the project are supplied by Duncan-based AFL from its plant in Swindon in southwest England. Jobs ripple beyond manufacturing through AFL’s chain of research, engineering, servicing, marketing and administration in the Upstate and elsewhere.

AFL, a subsidiary of Fujikura of Japan, is a major international supplier of optical ground wire, black jacket cable and premise cable. It is a business that has had “32 percent annual growth,” a spokesperson said.

The company has four plants in Duncan and is adding a fifth in June to accommodate growth in its conductor accessories business. In March, the company set records in cable manufacturing. AFL’s workforce in Spartanburg has grown from 613 to 685 in the past 12 months.

Last week, Boye Olusanya, managing director of Dangote, the private Nigerian company building the network, was in Duncan to confer with AFL executives and technical experts on the next steps in their business relationship.

“Ultimately, our intention is to find ways to continue to collaborate with AFL because we are comfortable with them, and not just on the fiber side of the business but on other initiatives,” he said.

Olusanya and Kurt Dallas, AFL’s vice president and general manager for cable systems, took time from meetings at AFL’s Duncan headquarters to talk to the Journal about the ambitious Nigerian project and what they expect will follow.

Under the initial contract, AFL is supplying more than 1,300 miles of Skywrap, a fiber cable that can be wrapped around existing overhead lines, making for faster and easier installation through Nigeria’s rugged terrain that spans rainforest in the south to sub-Saharan desert in the north.

The project involves more than 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) of fiber. Dangote has completed about 750 km in Nigeria’s tropical south and southeast and is ready to begin construction in the predominately sub-Saharan north.

“We’ve done about $30 million U.S., and we are looking at about $120 million U.S.,” he said.

The network will serve as the backbone for broadband data communications that will put Nigeria at a higher level than many other nations. It also gives AFL a showcase for its technology.

“This is a marquee for us because it is a great model of a partnership where you can take not only a single technology, which is Skywrap, but take in some of the other technologies where we are going to take to this long-term,” said Dallas.

“Dangote has the vision and the means it takes to do a full infrastructure, and that is a model that can work in many other developing areas.”

Dangote is “the biggest private business in Nigeria, and we have expanded into about 12 African countries. So in size and scale, we’ve become quite huge,” Olusanya said. The company is on course to do $12 billion to $13 billion in annual revenues, he said.

Dallas and Olusanya envision leveraging the broadband network, which Dangote will operate as a wholesale supplier, for other users to take connectivity to the retail level. They said Dangote will also “start deploying fiber into their network operating centers, perhaps to data centers and to other technologies.”

While the Skywrap is manufactured in England, the next steps “take you to a number of products that are manufactured here,” Dallas said.

Olusanya said the number of mobile phone users among Nigeria’s 150 million people in a geography twice the size of California grew “from zero 10 years ago to about 100 million.” But there remains a need for the multiple-purpose data connectivity Dangote is building with its network.

“We expect other African countries will want us to do the same kind of solution,” he said.

This puts AFL in a good position to benefit as a supplier of cable for the long haul all the way to the application to the end-user, Dallas said.

The Nigerian contract “is not the biggest one we’ve done,” he said. “We’ve done a number of projects around the world – fiber optic links from Europe to Asia across Siberia in one of the most rugged areas to build lines. We’ve done projects in other parts of Africa, in Latin America, in the upper parts of Norway.”

Still, he said, the Dangote contract “is a real marquee project for us. It taps into some other opportunities that we hope we can leverage. They are active in many other industries, and we are talking about different applications for different industries, potentially oil and gas and other industries where AFL has technology advancements.”

Nigeria is the world’s 12th largest oil producer, and AFL has a strong niche position in supplying cabling for the oil and gas and mining industries.