Anurag Garg is managing director of Direct OnPC, a leading Internet Service Provider in the country. Garg joined DOPC six years ago from Zenith Computers Limited, India; he has vast knowledge of the country’s Internet service market having served as chief operating officer before becoming managing director early this year. He spoke to chike onwuegbuchi and funmi ilesanmi on issues around growing the industry.

Fast Tracking Software Development in Nigeria
In the last six years I have seen lots of talents in the Nigerian software space. I believe what needs to be done is to put the guidelines in place, the structure of development should be in place but then there are some other things especially infrastructure and research which needs to be developed. Today, if you are talking of software, software in itself is a service; it is more of the application of the software that is important. You don’t buy Microsoft today, you buy the application of Microsoft. When you want to use the software developed by this people, they need to run on certain machines. If you don’t have electric power supply for instance, you run on generator and other things so the whole process becomes expensive. That is why I believe the scenario is not good enough.
Challenges of ISPs
There are two or three reasons why traditional ISPs are not thriving. One very important reason is that in this country, people do not understand what they need in terms of bandwidth, Internet and other applications. There is no longer a market where you buy bandwidth and sell it like that, you need to do a lot of value additions on that. In my opinion, some people were not offering any value additions. People need value additions in terms of the ease of services. For instance, in terms of Vsat, except for DoPC, all other providers of Vsat are still using the invoice system. That means, they generate a bill and give it to you every month. If you interviewed a cyber café owner whose complete business depends on the Internet, he will tell you that either they have customers or not, they get a bill from their ISPs monthly so the business is becoming tough for them and that is why cyber cafes  get shut down. Though there are other factors contributing to this but then this is also one of the reasons.
What we have done as value additions is that we no longer generate invoice in Direct On PC. We have made it a prepaid card system just like recharge cards for phones. If a cyber café owner felt that the time is good and customers are coming, he will recharge and if not, he will not recharge. Giving a kind of value addition is very necessary in this market for you to help people because the business of an ISP is dependent on the business of its customers. If customers are not doing well, the ISP will not do well; it is a service chain. It is not a product that you sell and forget about it.
All said and done, some people are making too much sales talk, that we do this, we do that but once you buy the product, you will see that they are not giving much when it comes to service quality. What we have done here which others have not is that we have a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software in place, which is a sophisticated software. The way it works is that if you are a customer and you have a problem, you call our technical support centre. Your call gets recorded immediately and then you are given an automatic ticket number to acknowledge that you lodged a complaint and it has been registered. Then, the technical team work with you to resolve the problem. After resolutions, they will confirm if you are satisfied with the solution. If the customer says “he is satisfied,” the ticket gets closed. Until then, the ticket remains open and there is an escalation. Let’s say you called today and if within 24 hours, the problem was not resolved, it escalates to the next level. From the technical support desk, it goes to the CTO, then to my level. Everyday I get a report of how many people called, how many problems got resolved, why was the problem not resolved today, why leave it to tomorrow and all that, which is very important in the service industry.
These are the factors, value additions and customer relationship which has being helping us in growing this market.
Bandwidth Issues
Three main cables are coming into the country, Glo 1, MainOne and another one coming in 2011 which is West Africa Cable System (WACS). With the coming of these cables, at least the monopoly of Nitel which is holding the SAT-3 for now will be over. These people are bringing too much of bandwidth in terms of fibre and the demand in the market is not so much. This will actually help the customer in that price will go down. It will become very affordable because there is lots of capacity, they are bringing in terabytes. The total capacity we are using in Nigeria is almost 25 STMs and they are bringing thousands of STMs, so the price is definitely going to crash. Once it crashes, it will be for the good of the market. We have seen in the telecom industry that when phones became more affordable, people bought phones like anything. We have more than 50 percent teledensity today. More than 50 percent of the people now have phones, so the same is going to happen in this industry. Today we have seven to eight percent Internet penetration but with the price coming down, it will definitely be like that of telecoms.
Vsat in Service Delivery     
This is one big challenge Nigeria is going to face. Cable is coming but it is landing in Lagos. The problem is how this cable in Lagos will be available in Kastina. The lastmile in the country is missing and this is not something we can do overnight, it will take us time. What will happen really is that, with the coming of these cables, you will see that Vsat will slowly begin to dwindle in main cities wherever fibre is available. Let’s say the first phase is Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. Vsat will go down until we start shifting the Vsat to the rural areas. It is not really a competition between Vsat and fibre because they complement each other. What will happen at the end of the day is that people in these cities will start using fibre and then move the use of Vsat to rural areas where the SAT-3 or any other fibre cable will not be available. The fibre wherever they reach will also serve as back up. When the Vsat is down, fibre will be there, similarly when fibre is down, Vsat back up will be there, so they will actually complement each other. The way I’m looking at it, I think even the satellite bandwidth cost will be reduced. Eventually, when these cables come in, satellite companies will also be pressurized to drop their prices because small operators who are taking two to five megawatts, I am not talking of 300 megawatts will move to cable. I think it is going to be interesting but good for the customer.
ISPs Leveraging on Fibre to Deliver Service 
Yes, it is quite possible. Again, it boils down to the same thing. Let’s say if wireless comes to Lagos, Saka Tinubu for instance, how will a traditional ISP with customers all over Lagos deliver from Saka Tinubu to each customer’s place? That is the challenge. Whichever way, ISP can do that, in technical terms we call it lastmile, so whoever can establish this lastmile will be the benefiting ISP. For instance, we are running Wimax network in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt so when these cables come, this is a boom for us in that it will help us in growing customers into many folds, with the Internet becoming cheap. I already have lastmile in Wimax. Today I have expensive bandwidth and that is why I have to charge a little higher. Tomorrow when it becomes cheaper, I would be able to sell cheap, that is how this will benefit operators.
Building Local Content
Developing local content is a very big task. First, there has to be a very big demand for local content. There are certain companies globally whose sole business is developing local content but there has to be enough demand for that content because it is a massive job which requires lots of money. Unless a company says this is the particular content and there is a demand for it, they will not put their money into developing that content because if it does not sell, they would have wasted their money. That is the big challenge I foresee in this country, why they are not able to do it. Internet is still in its niche form as the total penetration today is around seven percent, which is very very low. How many people are actually browsing the Internet? Out of these people , how many are looking for Nigerian content per say? Many of them may just be checking their yahoo mail. Until you have the people who want local content, it cannot work. It is more of demand. If the demand is there, the content will be there.
Regulation in the Internet Space
In my opinion, the regulatory framework is already in place, so it is not about regulation. It has to do with demand; demand comes from PC penetration and computer literacy. How many people out there are computer literate? How many people have computers? There has to be a good PC penetration in the market. I’ll give an example, let’s talk of telephone. Today even the small boys on the street have a GSM handset, even my housemaid has one. I am sure they might be spending around N2,000 monthly on recharge cards. My subscription plan for the market starts from N3,000 to N3,500 which is not very different from N2,000. I am talking of a house maid spending N2,000 on recharge card. In essence, it is not even about the price at the end of the day, of course pricing is a very good factor but then at the end of the day, that is not the only factor. The difference between the two is that to use a phone , you don’t have to be literate. If you are an okada man or you drive a molue, you can still use a phone but to use the Internet, you have to be computer literate. That I believe is what is keeping this country from going ahead in this direction.
The way it will happen in my opinion is to have an initiative between the NCC and PC manufacturers such as Zinox, Omatek and the rest to increase PC penetration, I think once increase in PC penetration is achieved, then the bandwidth becomes cheaper with the coming of the cables, these two factors will stimulate the growth of the industry. This is where I see this country going. One thing I am sure of, whatever scenario you see today in the Internet space, in two years, you will see a completely different scenario.
DOPC Products
Wimax is basically a very beautiful product, our brand name is Unwired. It is a quite affordable, handy device which you can take anywhere within the range of Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt and use the service. The beauty is one, it is portable so you can take it anywhere. Two, it is very fast compared to the traditional Internet. Wimax gives you better true boot technically so you can provide fast speed to your customers and quite affordable also. We are working on the latest standard in Wimax; very soon, we will be out with further expansion on Wimax. We will also expand our number of base stations and our intention is to take it further to where service is not available.

Future of DoPC
We already have a clear focus on which direction we are heading. There has been a registered systematic progress in the journey we started in 2002 till date. In 2002, when we launched, we were just a KU band Vsat Company but by 2004 we started offering C band services. In 2005, we launched our Hub and since then every year we launch a new hub. Today, we have seven hubs apart from our Wimax network. This year and coming years, the focus will be more on Wimax expansion. We want to become a company which has both types of customers. One, the common man on the street, for them to afford the Internet so we will welcome Wimax to take care of that. Then, side by side we will welcome enterprise class customers which we already have and we will be expanding on that. The retail customers basically need the Internet, so we will welcome that with Wimax then the enterprise customers whose needs are sophisticated in terms of VPN, security, firewalls and everything because their line is different. We are pursuing these two things simultaneously and this will be our goal in the next two years. You can be rest assured that in the next two years, we will be multiple the size of what we are today.