A major telecommunication company in Nigeria, 9Mobile has, as part of its consistent drive to play dominant role in data and smart technology, taken a bold step to operate in an emerging smart city in Lagos, Nigeria’s sprawling commercial hub.
Lagos State government has declared its intention to achieve a smart city status in the near future, even as it contends with a large swathe of the state requiring serious attention for regeneration. The state government is currently laying optic fibre across the state in partnership with a private sector company.
Authorities of 9Mobile say they are conscious of the strategic position of Lagos as the pace setter for other parts of Nigeria with a massive population of 200 million people, and also see the need to support the state government in its avowed commitment to achieve smart city status.
Consistent with this, the telco has gone into partnership with a new city, Gracefield Island, in Lekki Central, with a view to creating a model smart city. Stjepan Udovicic, the Chief Commercial Officer, leading senior executives of 9Mobile made this known during his familiarisation tour of the upcoming Gracefield Island, where it has already put in key telecom infrastructure.
“We are attracted to this new city by the sheer scale of the project, its differentiation and novelty. It is unique in Lagos and Nigeria as a whole. The scale of the project is going to be humongous and for us it is an excellent platform to showcase the quality of services we have to offer,” Udovicic said at the tour.
Besides surrounding the entire island city with 5G signals, doing smart metering and providing artificial intelligence, Udovicic also committed to bringing to the table expertise in technology such as internet connectivity, information technology and software to support all the services.
He further stated that, “when this project is completed, the world is going to talk about it because it is going to be very special and unique. It is something that is not done every day.”
The 9Mobile team was pleasantly surprised to see that a commercial bank has already established an ATM gallery on the island to serve project team members and visitors to the island, with the ATM running on 9Mobile telecom infrastructure. The upcoming island city is already covered by WiFi.
Udovicic committed to making Internet of Things (IoT) a reality on Gracefield Island. To this extent, the telco and Gracefield Island have established a process that will require assessment of building designs for IoT compliance before submission for building plan approval.
After two to three challenging years, Udovicic is optimistic and assured that 9Mobile was out to do business, more so with a strengthened management team
