The Federal Government, through the National Broadband Council, has approved four fibre optic cable landing points in four coastal states to ensure widespread penetration of high capacity internet bandwidths in the country.
The project which will be financed by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) will be sited in Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross River and Ondo states in line with the federal government’s effort to encourage telcos in the country to establish more cable landing points.
The backbone infrastructure in the country has improved significantly over the last decade, with multiple players, including Phase 3, Glo 1, Suburban Telecom, Multilink and MTN, building fibre networks that crisscross the country. However, in 2014 telecoms service providers rolled out only 38, 000km of fibre optic cables in their expansion across the country, compared to 68, 000km and 57,000km in 2013 and 2012 respectively.
The federal government is targeting a 30 percent penetration by 2018 as part of its National broadband plan. By 2020, which is the target date for Nigeria’s long term economic development strategy, FMCT hopes that these figures will have jumped to 76 percent.
“Broadband remains out of reach of average Nigerians because fibre needed to move bandwidth around is limited and mainly found in some cities and capitals”, said Lanre Ajayi, President, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCOM).
In places where fibre does not exist, they are mainly proprietary networks. The cost of accessing them is highly prohibitive and discriminatory”, Ajayi said in an interview with BusinessDay.
Prior to this announcement, Nigeria only had a landing point in Lagos to facilitate international submarine optic cables from Main One Cable Company, MTN’s West Africa Cable System (WACS), SAT 3 from the NITEL and Globacom’s Glo 1 cable.
Speaking on this development, Chairman of the council and Minister of Communications Technology, Omobola Johnson, said the 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 make it faster and cheaper to lay terrestrial cable from these points to other parts of the country and reduce vulnerability and risks associated with a single point of failure in the system,” she said.
With the growing demand for data and internet connectivity, we have seen a steady and healthy growth in both mobile and broadband businesses, surpassing all expectations. Nigeria has moved from 6 percent when the National Broadband Plan was launched, to about 10 percent broadband penetration today. However, broadband speed in Nigeria remains quite abysmal when compared to other frontier economies – “National average broadband speed is now 4.7Mbps up from 1.0Mbps in 2011”, according to Communications Technology Minister, Omobola Johnson in a recent interview.
Nigeria lags behind at number 10 position in Africa with a broadband speed of 5.66Mbps as at the time of this report according to Global index for February 2015 by OOKLA.
“Though, over 75 million Nigerians are currently connected to the internet, a deeper high-speed internet penetration, as currently being championed by the regulator, is required to propel better economic growth in Nigeria”, said Tony Ojobo, Director, Public Affairs, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), while addressing a group of journalists in Abuja recently.
The promising Smart States initiative by the federal government, which sees states committing to reduce the cost of broadband access by reducing taxation and simplifying regulation, has received accolades from industry experts and also saw Nigeria move up the latest global affordable internet ranking. Already, Bayelsa, Ondo, Katsina, FCT, Lagos and Cross Rivers State have signed on the smart state initiate while Anambra, Delta, Gombe and Osun States have agreed to become Smart States.
The Smart States initiative geared at engaging authorities at both the state and local government level to address the issue of multiple taxations would accelerate the roll out of critical infrastructure across the country – and aid the FG in meeting its broadband target of a five -fold increase by 2017.
BALA AUGIE
