Charles Anudu, managing director, Swift Networks, has passion for the technological advancement of the country. This he has demonstrated in moving Swift Network from intermediate internet service provider to a major one in delivering broadband services.
Anudu is trained in agronomy, electronics and business. He spoke to chike onwuegbuchi on some of his company’s new initiative to extend broadband internet service to more Internet users.

Hotspot Initiative
Hotspot was launched to further distribute our services to the segment of the market many people have not tried to address. There are lots of people who for one reason or the other, are not able to connect to internet services either because they are on transit, new in town, or do not know the service provider to choose, such people can access internet in the Hotspots. The idea is to provide where one can have access to a very high speed internet in a clean and easy to find environment.
At Swift, we have enough bandwidth to serve as many customers as possible, but the question is how to get the service across to the people. The essence of the hotspot initiative is to find locations where people naturally visit, places like fast food outlets, entertainment centres, malls, markets, country clubs and social clubs. We install the hotspot in those areas so that natural patrons of these areas would have access to the internet thereby making real connectivity ubiquitous in areas where we operate.
Response to the Initiative    
Fantastic, it shows there is a gap. A lot of people love it, the experience has been positive; it also serves as a very good interface to interact with our customers and to learn more about different segments of the market which we never knew much about.
Extending Services to Eateries and Public Places
The service is not exclusively Tetrazzini. Silverbird is also running the service and a few other centres are coming up shortly. We are also launching the service across many cyber cafes but why we started essentially with Tetrazzini was because, we wanted a franchise we could use to prototype the business model, study the business module to see people’s response in order to fine-tune it and Tetrazzini was kind enough to partner with us in that area. We are rapidly expanding to other outlets, you can find it on all the floors of Silverbird Galleria and we are also extending it to as many spots as possible.
Empowering Cyber cafes with Broadband
We are bringing three specific values to them. The hotspot project runs on our fibre or microwave infrastructure, it does not run on our last mile service. It is not that the last mile service is not good, but it is intended for small business users few computers. The cyber cafes and all the hotspots run on our fibre optic infrastructure, which means that theoretically they can get any speed they desire.
We give them speed; we are committed to giving each of them a minimum of 1Megabyte of internet access. We are bringing to them adequate equipment as well as our corporate advertising because periodically we are going to advertise in the media, letting people know areas that have distinguished internet services so that people would know that these cyber cafes have actually differentiated themselves through very high quality service.
We are also bringing management system to them in order to ensure revenue assurance and accountability.
Combining Wimax and Wifi Technologies
At Swift we use so many technologies. We have fibre optic infrastructure, microwave network and last mile. Of course, you will find out that we deliver to cyber cafes or hotspot locations using either microwave or fibre infrastructure. We use Wifi to rebroadcast the service so that the back haul going into the hotspot locations is going to be fibre, if it is near our fibre route. We use microwave so that we can pump in as much capacity of bandwidth as they can ever consume at that location.
Launching Voice Service Commercially
Our vision is to be the leading converged services provider, giving internet and voice plus any other value added service we can. Our strategy is ultimately convergence.
We re-evaluate our journey at each point. A lot of people are already offering voice services to people and we feel at this point in time that the easiest way we can differentiate ourselves is to go to the area where our strength is visible and that is in the area of data.
Video Service for Traffic Monitoring
The service is still there, but it is meant only for our subscribers at this point. We wanted to go public but constraint by capacity issues. We need a reasonable extra capacity to deliver the service to consumers otherwise the quality of service of our Internet will suffer. In order to prevent this, we are holding back on that service because if we launched it, it is likely that it would not run efficiently and it is may affect the experience our current customers have.
Extending Operations to other Parts of the Country
I know a lot of people have found our Lagos centric strategy very confusing. Strategy is about how you see the world and how you define the world. When we started Swift Network was more like entering field operations, we needed to learn, get a few things right, develop manpower because we found out that before now the expertise we had in this country has been in the area of voice, so we needed to develop our human resource, and understand how to enter the market with data services. I am happy to announce that we are confident to say we fully understand the business, we have prototyped it and very soon you will hear of our intention to step outside Lagos.      
Intended Locations
We are going to Abuja and Port Harcourt and I know a lot of people would want to ask why? Our reason for this is strategic because Abuja would eventually serve as our centre for northern expansion. Whereas Port Harcourt would be the centre for South –Eastern and South-South expansion, and from Lagos, we would move in the direction of the south west. We are setting up three centres from where we would expand. We are definitely going to Abuja and Port Harcourt and NCC has been kind enough to grant us licenses for these locations.
Competition in the Market
It is just a case of where the market is and the market is never homogenous. All customers are not the same, what we are experiencing is a case of people splitting into different segment of the market where they belong. Eventually it will still be a mixture of all sorts; some people would continue to use Vsat because that is what suits them. Of course, somebody in his village is expected to use Vsat probably because there is no other service available and as you can see Vsat is uniquely positioned for that particular service. If you are doing basic internet, most of the basic CDMA and GSM internet services can do but if you are a bank and you need to interconnect your branches involving lots of data, you will find out that the GSM or the CDMA platform may not be able to support the kind of platform or software you are using. So, people are sorting themselves out by going to where they can be better served. Again, the market is still young and there is significant confusion in the market at the moment. Telecom operators are addressing a different segment that was not touched by anybody because you and I never used Vsat in our small businesses so there is a typical role for such services.
You do not expect a company like Chevron or Mobil to log data from the Niger delta to the United States using the CDMA card neither do you expect First Bank for instance to interconnect their branches using CDMA or GSM technology. Some technologies may be able to address more than one segment but there will be a place for everybody in the market.
Alternative Sea Cable and Reduction in the Cost of Internet Services 
I think one thing you can expect is that as the supply site improves, both the backbone side and in the last mile segment, prices would drop because the cost for the operator is also expected to drop significantly. What we are seeing at the moment is basically little or no fibre capacity into Nigeria because Sat-3 of Nitel is very epileptic. Sat-3 was down in the whole of January and February and has gone down since late March, so virtually that option has not been a viable one. Most of us rely on a secondary fibre capacity which is Vsat and a lot of satellite operators do not have good footprints in West Africa because it is not usually the choice location to seek traffic.
I think it will be a major lifeline for most operators, if any of these cables or satellite initiative comes on stream. A major aspect of our cost is in the area of backbone capacity; almost one in every N2 we charge goes to the backbone service operators because of unreliable service. At Swift, we use three backbone service providers instead of one. You find out that instead of paying for one backbone service, you are paying for three where one could have been okay coupled with other challenge we face, which are major reasons the service is expensive and will remain expensive until some of these backbone initiatives are put in place.
Sharing or Leasing Infrastructure 
In telecoms, everybody does business with everybody. A lot of people use our fibre infrastructure when they come to Lagos and we use a lot of other people’s infrastructure. Many of the base stations we use now are not entirely ours we collocate with other service providers.
People who were arrogant and would not consider sharing their infrastructure are considering this kind of posture and I think, that is for the good of the industry. For us, we have been very open right from day one in sharing with anybody who would like to share with us because it makes everyone of us more competitive in surviving hard times.
Vision for Swift Network
The vision is to build Swift into Nigeria’s leading converged broadband services provider. We would do this by dedicating all our resources, energies and talents towards ensuring that our subscribers do not feel any difference in experience whether they are in London, New York or Lagos. People do business with us not because we are their friends or we are Nigerians but because Swift is a very competitive company. To build value into our stakeholders, be it our staff, our communities, the government, our suppliers and all the people to whom we render services know that we are differentiated and distinguished in our constituency. Definitely, our vision is very clear, we are playing in the broadband space and we are not going to do anything narrow brand.