Ovia calls for national network backup

The founder, Visafone Communications Limited, Mr. Jim Ovia, has called for the establishment of a national network backup against any unforeseen disaster and to aid the recovery, reports CHARLES OKOH.

Mr. Ovia who made this call at the weekend in Lagos, during the one-day D-Link Contemporary Technologies and Solutions seminar, noted that as a nation Nigeria risks suffering a total Information and Communication Technology (ICT) network collapse without the skilled knowledge capacity to fix it quickly and timely.

Dwelling on “Knowledge networks: Strategic tools for bridging digital divide,” Ovia who was represented by the Managing Director, Visafone, Mr. Ninan Thomas said the future of businesses, families, government and national survival, to a large extent, depend and continue to depend on ICT network infrastructure, design, content, application, technical support and security.

The former president of the Nigeria Internet Group (NIG) also called for an urgent need to build a critical mass of skilled networking engineering capacities for the business continuity of the nation, stating that the significance of the event was that it challenges the collective ability to better understand, apply and use ICT networks as fundamental instruments for bridging digital divide and serves as a veritable tool for actualizing the opportunities and benefits presented by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

According to him, “today, computer networks have become the centre of gravity of the global economy as ICT networks and their topologies signify the way in which intelligent devices in the network see their logical relations to one another.”

Mr. Ovia also said that in technical terms, there would be no internet without the computer networks such as Local Area Network (LAN), Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN).

He added, for instance, that there will be no Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) and cell phone connectivity, e-banking, e-payment, e-learning, e-government, e-education, e-books, telemedicine, distant learning and digital platform of today’s global economy and globalization which are inter-connected as e-everything is made possible by computer networks, better known as knowledge networks.

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