Council plans to increase submarine cable landing stations

•Tasks BitFlux on faster service roll out on 2.3GHz spectrum

FOR maximum utilization of Nigeria’s submarine cables, the National Broadband Council may have concluded plans  to increase their landing points beyond Lagos to other coastal states, due to the assessed strategic importance of the facilities. 

    Already, over $3.5 billion had been invested in landing the four submarine cables in the country, including MainOne Cables; Glo1; WACS and SAT 3. They have about 11 terabytes bandwidth capacity, which the operators have complained of been grossly underutilized. 

   The need to increase the landing points was mulled at the meeting of the Broadband Council held recently in Abuja and chaired by the Minister of Communications Technology, Dr. Omobola Johnson.

   But The Guardian learnt that the council may be eyeing coastal areas including Port Harcourt; Cross River, Ondo among others as new landing points.

  The Broadband Council has also frowned at the slow roll out of services by BitFlux, winner of the 2.3GHz spectrum license for wholesale broadband deployment across the country, a year after defeating Globacom to the license.

   According to the council, additional landing points in the country would not only reduce vulnerability and  risks associated with a single point of failure but would make it faster and cheaper to lay terrestrial cable from these points to other parts of the country.

   The council, which has former Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Ernest Ndukwe and Chairman of Zenith Bank, Jim Ovia has members, also urged NCC to aim at releasing the 2.6GHz spectrum in the first quarter of 2015.

    The meeting, which was held on February 3, the Special Assistant to the Minister on Media, Efem Nganga in a statement, said the council also acknowledged the progress made on the implementation of the Broadband Plan in the last 18 months, especially the increased capacity rolled out by telecommunications operators and other infrastructure providers which had resulted in a two per cent increase in broadband penetration in 2014, adding that the team also noted the successful auction of the 2.3GHz spectrum, licensing of the first two InfraCos for metro fibre rollout and called on successful bidders to quickly rollout to improve the pace of implementation.

 While the council commended the trial of TV White Spaces approved by NCC and the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) geared at reducing cost of Internet access, it also hailed the telecoms operators for their leadership in the area of base station infrastructure sharing and deployment and resolved that this needed to be extended to fibre.

   Council called on the NCC and the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) to look into the possibility of providing financial incentives to accelerate this and acknowledged that some milestones were missed due to schedule delays.

  The Broadband Team, also reviewed progress on the Ministry’s Smart State initiative aimed at getting concessions from State governments (right of way reductions, standardization on levies and charges on telecommunications infrastructure)

   States that had signed the MoU on the Smart State Initiative with it were singled out by the Council for commendation and other states yet to join were urged to do so to accelerate the pace of broadband infrastructure rollout within their States. 

  “Bayelsa, Ondo, Katsina, FCT, Lagos and Cross Rivers State are Smart States while Anambra, Delta, Gombe and Osun State have agreed to become Smart States. Council reiterated that the Smart States initiative geared at engaging authorities at the state and local government level to address the issue of multiple taxations will accelerate the roll out of critical infrastructure across Nigeria and help Nigeria meet its broadband target of a five -fold increase by 2017.

   “Council also resolved that the Nigeria Internet Registration Association, NiRA must reduce cost of .NG to be globally competitive.  Council proposed that to accelerate the uptake of.NG domains NITDA would close the funding gap in NiRA if pent up demand did not result in the anticipated high levels of uptake. Council members were tasked with following up on this resolution”, the Council stated.

   Meanwhile, in recognition of the crucial role broadband plays in inclusive development and in a bid to increase awareness and drive demand, the Council acknowledged the work of online market spaces in encouraging SMEs to bring their products/services online and urged SMEDAN to fund or drive an awareness campaign that will get many more SMES online.

   Recalled that the Broadband Council at its 4th meeting pushed for increased 3G coverage to 50 per cent of the Nigerian population by the end of 2015, the council commended the USPF for the timely completion of its ICT Access Gap Study and concluded this would further help operators to service latent demand. Council stressed that the significant work by the USPF has given real empirical data to the issue of which areas of the country have connectivity.

   The Council members scored overall progress as good but needing acceleration on items such as pricing and metro fibre. Following the recent announcement of the InfraCo License winners the NCC’s work on Wholesale and Cost Based Pricing to improve the affordability of access to the internet would soon be available. Council concluded that progress was still too slow and challenged the ICT industry to see to it that the broadband plan targets were met.