The National Broadband Council chaired by Omobola Johnson, minister of communications technology, has okayed the building of fibre optic cable landing points in four coastal states to ensure widespread diffusion of high capacity internet bandwidths around the country to be financed by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF).
Apart from Lagos State, which houses international submarine optic cables from MainOne, MTN’s West Africa Cable System (WACS), NITEL’s SAT 3, and national carrier, Globacom’s Glo 1 cable, government plans to encourage telecommunication operators to establish cable landing points in Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross River and Ondo states.
According to Johnson, cable landing points will promote the rapid establishment of recovery and restoration agreements among the cable companies and delivery of additional landing points for national security and resilience purposes.
“Additional landing points in the country would not only reduce vulnerability and risks associated with a single point of failure but would make it faster and cheaper to lay terrestrial cable from these points to other parts of the country. The council called on the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the USPF to look into the possibility of providing financial incentives to accelerate this,” she said.
Only recently in Lagos, the KPMG came out with a study entitled ‘Cost-based Transmission Cable Pricing and Development of an Accounting Separation Framework/Retail Voice Tariff’ conducted on Nigerian telecom market which would set a price cap and rules for transmission cable pricing for telecom operators and stakeholders. Joseph Tegbe, head of telecom consulting, KPMG, said the study covered the entire nation where operators exist.
“The model has been built on a national basis. We are presenting it to you so that you can make your comments for us to factor it in and come out with a final draft,” he said. Representative of the telecom companies who spoke sought clarifications on issues like multiple taxations, multiple regulations and discriminatory pricing.
Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman of the NCC, said the current arbitrary, predatory and discriminatory pricing inherent in the transmission line market segment would be reversed with a new regulation and enforcement on cost-based transmission cable pricing.
According to the broadband council, progress has been made on the implementation of the broadband plan in the last 18 months, especially the increased capacity rolled out by telecom operators and other infrastructure providers that had resulted in a 2 percent increase in broadband penetration in 2014. Johnson said government and telecom operators also reviewed the progress on the ministry’s Smart State Initiative aimed at getting concessions from state governments (right of way reductions, standardisation on levies and charges on telco infrastructure). States yet to sign the memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the initiative with the ministry were urged to do so to accelerate the pace of broadband infrastructure rollout within their states.
Bayelsa, Ondo, Katsina, the FCT, Lagos and Cross Rivers state are smart states while Anambra, Delta, Gombe and Osun states have agreed to become smart states. The council reiterated that the initiative geared at engaging authorities at the state and local government level to address the issue of multiple taxations will accelerate the roll-out of critical infrastructure across Nigeria and help Nigeria meet its broadband target of a five-fold increase by 2017.
Ben Uzor
