Broadband Summit to Discuss Next Decade of Telecom Revolution
- By Abimbola Tooki
- Published July 25th, 2011
- News
- Unrated
Stakeholders of the Nigerian telecommunications industry will gather this week in Lagos to discuss the future of Nigeria’s information and telecommunications industry. The summit, organized by BusinessWorld Communications Limited in collaboration with the Association of Telecom Operators of Nigeria (Atcon) focuses on how to grow broadband internet business awareness, infrastructure, content and value- added services in Nigeria.
This is the first major outing for both organisations in the implementation of a roadmap for sustaining the gains of the last decade and preparing for the next during which the industry must provide access to large population using broadband internet as tool.
The discussion will set the tone for the country’s journey to the next decade of telecom revolution under the theme ‘Connecting the Next 50 million Telecom Users’ within the context of how broadband deployment can serve as general purpose service delivery and expose the huge businesses that are available in Nigeria.
The first decade of Nigeria’s telecom revolution started in 2001 when the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) awarded GSM licences to the winners of an earlier auction exercise that took place in Abuja.
Already, world-class speakers have confirmed their attendance of the summit that will witness a lead paper to be presented by Fola Adeola, chairman of MainOne, a cable provider company in Nigeria. Adeola’s paper is titled ‘A forecast into Nigeria’s investment climate in the next decade.
A thought-provoking presentation on ICT opportunities in infrastructure, rural access to telephony and content in Nigeria would also be made by Russell Southwood, chief executive, Balancing Act, a consultancy and research company specialising in telecoms, internet and broadcast in Africa’; and Isabelle Gross, an investment expert from the United Kingdom.
According to Titi Omo-Ettu, president of Atcon, “it may be strange information to many of us that when we weighed the problems which confront our industry as a component of the Nigerian economy, all the issues of low technical skills, poor access to financing, barrier to investment, and all that - all constitute 30 per cent. It is in finding solution to this 30 per cent that we are gathered to brainstorm and chart a path.”
Omo-Ettu noted that the other 70 per cent constituted by poor access to reliable public electricity that refuses to go away can only be left for government to work at sorting out.
“We have already said we are now done with number of connected lines as index of our industry development,” he said. “We want to shift emphasis to using the actual number of our citizens who have access to telecommunications for planning and developing our market.”
According to Southwood, bringing voice and data services to more Nigerians is not just about putting a Blackberry smartphone in their hands. The foundations of future services will need to be built by creating a resilient fibre infrastructure. Currently, many of Nigeria’s main centres are connected by fibre but the cost of using it is expensive and reliability is variable. For example, one inter-urban link (with two providers) has only 70 per cent up-time.
Nigeria is connected to the global world through three international submarine cables SAT3, Glo1 and MainOne and by 2012, two more cables (WACS and ACE) will be in place. The country has more than enough capacity at the landing station but the major bottlenecks are now two-fold: delivering that capacity around the country.
This is the first major outing for both organisations in the implementation of a roadmap for sustaining the gains of the last decade and preparing for the next during which the industry must provide access to large population using broadband internet as tool.
The discussion will set the tone for the country’s journey to the next decade of telecom revolution under the theme ‘Connecting the Next 50 million Telecom Users’ within the context of how broadband deployment can serve as general purpose service delivery and expose the huge businesses that are available in Nigeria.
The first decade of Nigeria’s telecom revolution started in 2001 when the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) awarded GSM licences to the winners of an earlier auction exercise that took place in Abuja.
Already, world-class speakers have confirmed their attendance of the summit that will witness a lead paper to be presented by Fola Adeola, chairman of MainOne, a cable provider company in Nigeria. Adeola’s paper is titled ‘A forecast into Nigeria’s investment climate in the next decade.
A thought-provoking presentation on ICT opportunities in infrastructure, rural access to telephony and content in Nigeria would also be made by Russell Southwood, chief executive, Balancing Act, a consultancy and research company specialising in telecoms, internet and broadcast in Africa’; and Isabelle Gross, an investment expert from the United Kingdom.
According to Titi Omo-Ettu, president of Atcon, “it may be strange information to many of us that when we weighed the problems which confront our industry as a component of the Nigerian economy, all the issues of low technical skills, poor access to financing, barrier to investment, and all that - all constitute 30 per cent. It is in finding solution to this 30 per cent that we are gathered to brainstorm and chart a path.”
Omo-Ettu noted that the other 70 per cent constituted by poor access to reliable public electricity that refuses to go away can only be left for government to work at sorting out.
“We have already said we are now done with number of connected lines as index of our industry development,” he said. “We want to shift emphasis to using the actual number of our citizens who have access to telecommunications for planning and developing our market.”
According to Southwood, bringing voice and data services to more Nigerians is not just about putting a Blackberry smartphone in their hands. The foundations of future services will need to be built by creating a resilient fibre infrastructure. Currently, many of Nigeria’s main centres are connected by fibre but the cost of using it is expensive and reliability is variable. For example, one inter-urban link (with two providers) has only 70 per cent up-time.
Nigeria is connected to the global world through three international submarine cables SAT3, Glo1 and MainOne and by 2012, two more cables (WACS and ACE) will be in place. The country has more than enough capacity at the landing station but the major bottlenecks are now two-fold: delivering that capacity around the country.
