Technical know-how frustrates migration Nigeria internet content home

Lack of technical know-how is said to be frustrating some Nigerian companies from migrating their Nigerian internet content home, Nigeria CommunicationsWeekhas learnt. The cost of hosting in the country, has not also helped matters, going by signs of not significant improvement in the efforts to host Nigerian information locally.

Government and stakeholders have consistently advocated for localisation of Nigerian internet content which will assist in making Nigeria internet traffic to remain in the country.

Mohammed Rudman, managing director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), an advocate of increased local internet content expressed frustrations of some Nigerian companies who are faced with absence of trained manpower to migrate their content home.

“Companies in ICT sector are faced with lack of trained manpower as some of the trained manpower are migrating to Canada, as such for those companies to move their information home it is seen as a risk. More so, reliability of cloud services provides have not be tested unlike that of data centre which have been found reliable with none of the data centres experiencing downtime since inception.

“They also lament high cost of hosting service in the country especially with the exchange rate of naira,” he said.Rudman said that keeping local traffic local and avoiding international links would help local operators and users reap substantial cost savings, provide substantial local bandwidth and significantly improve local internet performance.He also urged local content providers who host their servers outside of the country to consider relocating them in other to boost local traffic and save money for the country.

Reacting to the high cost of hosting content in Nigeria, Ike Nnamani, president, Medallion Communication, a data centre operator, explained that there are two sides to hosting of information in a data centre.“One side is a subscriber who may be individual or corporates taking up hosting service with domain name company, while the second side is the cost of the domain name company putting up the service in a data centre.

“The cost of domain name companies hosting at data centres is competitive and in some cases cheaper than what obtains abroad, but the cost of taking up service from domain name company varies and is higher. However, the business is driven by volume as not many Nigerians are requesting for the service,” he said.

Rudman further explained that as a net importer of bandwidth, the country’s internet users browse more on eContent that are domiciled internationally than eContent that are localised.He noted that this scenario is attributed to the high cost of internet access in the country, “cost increases as you move away from the content”.

In order to reserve this trend, Rudman said that Nigerians should start hosting their information locally and government should lead the way by ensuring data sovereignty such that all her information are locally hosted.“Government should promote local hosting because of its value chain as hosting of data locally will reduce capital flight. We don’t have to pay for hosting of data in dollars when it is host in-country,” he added.