The year 2008 was tagged, “The Year of Broadband” by the Nigerian Communications Commission, but the present reality of the declaration is far fetched considering the non-implementation of aiding projects at various levels.
The scenario, prior to the declaration, is still the same for the Nigerian populace, characterised with prohibitive cost of broadband, (high Internet bandwidth), with stakeholders sharing the sentiment that a better situation could be attained considering the economic muscle of the country.
Broadband facilitates business as well as other socio-economic framework, with its relevance spanning across sectors like telecommunications, banking, aviation, oil and gas, ISPs and finance, just to mention a few, with secondary consumers like cyber cafes, media houses, among others, equally on a similar pedestal.
The huge mess the country was exposed to as a result of the strike embarked upon by workers of the Nigerian Telecommunication Limited, sometimes last year, which saw the SAT-3 being disconnected severely affected businesses and companies with huge losses.
This is because the SAT-3 provided a network platform for these businesses.
The President, Nigeria Internet Group, Mr. Lanre Ajayi, said broadband was achievable in Nigeria, but there were various challenges militating against the realisation of its access, noting that the unavailability of a national transmission network coupled with an ineffective Internet exchange point, was a limiting factor.
Experts believe that broadband has not kept pace with the burgeoning advancement in the country’s telecoms landscape, making it one of the areas that requires urgent underpinning.
With the NCC raising the hopes of Nigerians with proposed projects like the State Accelerated Broadband initiative – designed to take broadband infrastructure to all the 36 state capitals of the country as well as urban and semi-urban centres; and Wire Nigeria (WIN) – targeted at ensuring the provision of optic fibre cable backbone infrastructure across the country to compliment the SABI, it is expected that things will go beyond the papers.
From recent reports, it is estimated that developing regions of the world, account for only 17 per cent of users of mobile broadband, and given the underdevelopment of the fixed-line infrastructure in these regions, mobile broadband services are expected to continue to record impressive growth.
Also, the developing world is projected to account for up to 57 per cent of global mobile broadband users by the end of 2015, with clear evidences linking countries’ gross domestic product growth to increasing Internet penetration.
This is indeed a message for the government owing to the recent progress attributed to the fall-out of the vibrancy of the telecommunications sector seen as an aftermath of a revolution in telecommunications and its impacts on other sectors of the economy.
Commenting on the challenge, the President, Association of Telecoms Companies of Nigeria, Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem, said Nigeria’s telecoms revolution would not be complete except the country succeed in delivering broadband services to its people in a ubiquitous and affordable manner.
According to him, the benefits of broadband services were so many that the country must focus on deploying the technology for the next phase of telecoms development rather than continuing to focus on voice communication only.
He pointed out that broadband would facilitate electronic learning, which is the basis for knowledge advancement, adding that, “Broadband is the future of the global telecoms industry, and the country must be ready for that.”
Stressing the need for full implementation of the exercise, the Project Coordinator, D-Day Online, Mrs. Adora Zulu-Okafor, said small businesses would as well be positively touched by the move.
According to her, e-commerce and e-marketing will thrive with a chain reaction, addressing prevailing high unemployment rate, and boosting output per-head, which ultimately would impact on the GDP positively.
Experts believe this will make the economy more productive, facilitate knowledge export with a multiplier effect on the nation’s gross national product; but are rather skeptical about the cost of the service, which has persistently been on the increase despite investments in broadband currently hitting $6.4bn in the African continent.
The Executive Secretary, African Internet Service Providers Association, Mr. Eric Osaikwam, believes that unless Africa has available and effective broadband at affordable prices, which will drive growth, the continent will still be behind other developed countries, adding that optic fibre highways were cardinal to actualising this feat.
Experts, however, say it is unacceptable that someone in America pays one dollar for broadband access, while another in Africa pays 40 times more.
No doubt, one of the key elements of ICT is broadband, a platform that brings together three converging sectors – computing, communications and broadcasting. Broadband takes Internet several notches above the “dial-up” technology it started with.
This has the capacity of opening up new opportunities for interactive applications, online games, virtual reality, digital broadcasting, and more importantly, e-governance.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Stanley Opara
Quelle/Source: The Punch, 27.01.2009
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