Nigeria achieves 10,000 km fibre optic

Nigeria has achieved an estimated 10,000 kilometre worth of fibre optic across the country.

Chief executive officer, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), gave this insight at the just ended Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) exhibition and conferences, ComBIT 2008, organised by the umbrella body of ICT companies in Nigeria, the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) in Lagos.

According to Ndukwe, Nigeria now has about 10,000 kilometre optics fibre deployment so far across the country, which he said is very significant when the impacts of these are felt among the networks.

While emphasizing on the issue of infrastructure sharing, which he said was not negotiable among the operators since NCC would ensure that whatever infrastructure available on ground would be fully utilized by all the operators to facilitate the provision of wide spread of services and improved quality of service (QoS) across the networks.

Ndukwe disclosed that presently NCC is pushing for provision of subsidy for private companies who would deploy services in the North West and North Eastern parts of the country.

These areas, he said, are yet to have substantial deployment.

"To ensure the provision of the needed optics fibre infrastructure to make certain the connectivity of the entire nation is achieved in due time," he asserted.

In addition, he said that stakeholders expectations in the industry is very high, and reiterated that the Commission would still consider the issues of quality of services, promising that a new set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), would soon be published by the Commission to provide more strict conditions on the quality of service expectations.

He pointed out that the provision of reliable power supply is central to the generation and provision of more employment in the country as well as the provision of telecom services.

He noted that small scale industries which could generate the highest number of employments in the country are fully dependent on power supply, while the telecom industry is still up to 35 per cent dependent on power supply.

Operating companies, he said, must do whatever they need to do to provide reliable services to their customers even if that means providing alternative sources of energy to achieve that.

"We at NCC will continue to monitor them to ensure that they continue to work hard to achieve acceptable quality of service", Ndukwe said, just as he announced the intention of NCC to soon release a Code of Practice Regulation (CPR), which would empower the subscriber to understand his rights on one side, and the obligations of the operators to him, on the other hand, in the provision of phone services in the country.

Describing telecommunications as a very important enabler of development, he reiterated NCC determination to put all efforts in place to ensure the spread of ICT all over the country.


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