Government, Nigerians hail satellite launch

Government, Nigerians hail satellite launch

The successful launch of Nigeria’s Sat-2 and Sat-X has been described as a major milestone in the development and technological advancement of Nigeria.

The Minister of Science and technology, Prof. Ita Ewa stated this in Abuja, the nation’s capital, while briefing reporters on the prospects of the launched satellite.

He said that the launch of the two satellites has repositioned Nigeria as a leading space faring nation on the continental.

Indigenous satellite, better in Africa

Meanwhile, the Managing Director of NigComSat, Alhaji Tumasaniyu Ahmed-Rufai, has described the launch of an indigenous satellite in Nigeria as capable of providing the best and cheapest satellite services to subscribers within Africa.

Ahmed-Rufai told reporters in Abuja recently that the satellite had been designed to effectively focus on African with better reception.

He said: “Our services are better, our foot prints are better than any satellite that is over-seeing Africa. The design of the satellite also took into consideration the weather conditions of Africa. We narrowed the footprint of the satellite to make it regional so that we can have a higher power and spend less on customer premises equipment because small dishes can be used for perfect reception.”

Tumasaniyu Ahmed-Rufai, Managing Director of NigComSat

He explained that customers would be spending half the amount of money they would have spent to get their works done since they could push two times more traffic than they are allocated.

Direct buying

Ahmed-Rufai expressed concern that more than 25 per cent of the cost of acquiring satellite bandwidth was as a result of middle-men, but that with NigComSat, customers could buy directly.

He said that for small and medium enterprises that could not afford to go into long lease, there would be room for them to pay about three months up-front and then issue a bank guarantee for repayment.

He, however, disclosed that it would take about three to four years for the company to sell off 100 per cent of the satellite’s capacity after it was launched.

According to him, this is so because most satellite customers go into long lease and as such, the would-be customers of NigComSat still had some years on their current satellite provider.

ADOBAS/NAN/Shakira