Nigeria: Broadband revolution lies in wait

Nigeria: Broadband revolution lies in wait
Samuel Okacha, Lagos

World's Internet statistics have shown that close to 44 million Nigerians have access to the internet.

Unlike before, internet services are now accessed almost anywhere using a Blackberry and other internet compactable phones.

“I have my email on my fingertips, I can easily go online if I want to browse for footwear, the latest shopping mall and browse for the latest electronics...you can chat on Yahoo and on Facebook...it has really made life easy,” says Tope an internet user in Nigeria.

While Tope acknowledges that internet service in Africa’s most populous country has improved, she believes service providers still have a lot to do in delivering consistent high speed internet. “I think on a scale of one to 10, I will give them five and a half,” she said.

Undersea cable projects, internet services and challenges

Last year, the first privately owned submarine network cable firm in West Africa, launched a 7,000 kilometers-long fiber optic undersea cable, running from Portugal to Nigeria, Ghana and also branching out to Morocco, the Canary Islands, Senegal and Ivory Coast.

The wholly African Main One Cable Company had said that with its cable system now turned on, the firm was poised to champion a communications revolution in Africa impacting businesses, governments and individuals by providing higher bandwidth and exceptional speed at a lower cost.

The President of Nigerian Internet Group, Lanre Ajayi  said that although the launched undersea fibre optic cable projects, like that of Main One, had improved speed to some extent, they were yet to meet the level of expectations of users across Nigeria.

Ajayi said that there were a number of challenges neede to be addressed saying “one of them is the last mile [the point at which the end consumers begin to enjoy the benefits of broadband projects] usually done by wireless technology and wireless spectrum.”

The President of Nigerian Internet Group said that a spectrum has to be made available to the operators to be able to deploy these services, while the national transmission backbone also has to improve in order to effectively transport the bandwidth from the landing station to various cities.

Price slashes of internet connection

Lanre Ajayi, however, said that the various fibre optic projects had led to a drastic reduction in the price of internet connectivity.

In his words; “You can see some GSM companies slashing their internet pricing almost by 50 percent; I want to believe that has to do with the availability of bandwidth as a result of the cables, but we certainly expected much cheaper pricing and much faster speed than we are having,”

Future of broadband in Nigeria

According to an ICT publisher, Ken Nwogbo, with the current fibre optic projects and other ones landing in the populous West African nation, Nigerians would experience further improvements in terms of internet speed, accessibility and affordability.

“It’s a process. But looking at the next three to four months, I see a whole lot of improvement. We are going to have virtually four to five times what we have now, an improvement from what we had last year,” the ICT publisher said.

Williams