Engr. Ernest Ndukwe, EVC, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has stated that Nigeria’s option to realizing ubiquitous broadband penetration across the country within a reasonable period of time can only be predicated on the deployment of broadband services over wireless infrastructure.
Ndukwe who spoke at the CEO Agenda Summit organized by the Economist Magazine of London at Eko Hotel, Lagos said that Nigeria does not have the luxury that other countries have in huge investments in fixed line infrastructure; but not withstanding, the nation cannot afford to move in a different direction from where the world is going.
He told the participants that NCC’s conscious efforts towards promoting broadband infrastructure in Nigeria began in 2007 when it declared 2008 as the year of broadband, which is the reason for the introduction of the State Accelerated Broadband Initiative (Sabi) designed to take broadband infrastructure to all the state capitals and major urban centres across the 36 states of the federation.
“In Nigeria, we believe it has to be over wireless. Doing it over the wire may not be possible if we must meet the world at the critical point of deployment of this important infrastructure of development,” he said.
With the current pace of deployment of telecom infrastructure in Nigeria, he said, the country may be one of the first adopters of the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology because of the potentials of the mobile broadband services, which are already being deployed today.
The NCC boss reiterated that broadband is already available in some Nigerian cities while the Commission is using initiatives such as the Digital Appreciation Project (Dap) and Community Communication Centres (CCC) to provide broadband services to a larger group of people.
He said it is heart-warming that few years ago, Nigeria was worried about lack of optic fibre infrastructure but today, we have plenty of this on ground which provides the nation with the basic foundation for broadband.
The fact that Nigeria has some international credit card companies like Visa, MasterCard and a host of others, he said, is because they found the environment attractive and conducive because of available infrastructure.
Ndukwe advised those who are advocating for operating companies to concentrate services in few urban centres so as to achieve 100 per cent quality of service while the rural areas will be denied of services to forget the idea.
“We want the 64 Million subscribers on the network to enjoy 80% quality of service rather than get only 20 Million of them in urban centres enjoying 100 per cent of that quality.”
“Those who said they cannot live with a situation whereby all Nigerians have access to phones and wants us to restrict services so that they can get 100% quality should drop their phones so that we can give it to many more Nigerians who want services and wait till we attain 100%,” he said.
He dismissed insinuations that many Nigerians carry multiple phones because of the current quality of service, and insisted that many were carrying such phones even when the quality of service was no issue and that one phone can serve anybody who really wants to use it. According to him, people carry these phones for many other reasons including the fact that some may want to enjoy some tariffs offered in the different networks.
Engr. Ndukwe also reminded those comparing Nigeria with the UK to note that that country has more than 40,000 base stations against Nigeria’s less than 15,000 base stations.
“This tells you that there are still a lot of black spots within the Nigerian network that will need to be covered with base station infrastructure.”
“Please note that base station is not such that you say, let there be base station, and there will be base station. It costs money and time and we have to learn to be a bit patient because we have a huge geographical land mass to cover,” he pleaded.
He observed that nobody should loose money on account of drop calls or the billing systems of the service providers, while stating that the NCC will sanction any operator for billing a subscriber for services not used.