Omo-Ettu canvasses support for broadband

Chief executive officer, Telecom Answers Associates (TAA), Mr. Titi Omo-Ettu has canvassed support for broadband adoption in the country, especially in alleviating poverty.

Speaking weekend, Omo-Ettu, noted there is need to support the campaign to encourage both the government and private sector to embrace broadband.

“We encourage our governments to appreciate the advantages of and invest in promotion of broadband access to our people no matter their location, status or station,” he said.

He noted though it is by no means an easy task, “but if it were easy it would not count as a task.”

Omo-Ettu, who also is the president, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) emphasized the ability of broadband diffusion to combat poverty at this age.

Maintaining that broadband could be applied to solve poverty issues.

“Broadband is no longer a luxury…it is a core infrastructure of the modern economy. Those who have it will prosper, those who don’t will fall further behind,” he declared.

ITRealms Online recalls that recently the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) noted that poverty entails individuals and communities cut off from resources, which could dramatically improve their standards of livelihood, that is, because communications connectivity is absent, limited or expensive.

ITU also said that whether these communities have been denied access to knowhow, or even market price data to sell their produce, they are stymied and trapped in deprivation, but all these could change with availability of broadband.

In developing countries, ITU said, information poverty rapidly becomes actual poverty, insisting that poverty reduction is the first, and arguably, most urgent, Millennium Development Goal of the United Nations.

Pointing out that an MDG snapshot revealed why as at late 2005, some 1.4 billion people still lived on USD 1.25 or less per day.

ITU further said that figures fluctuate but around 10 million people still die annually of hunger, and present trends in rising food prices and the global economic crisis may have pushed at least 90 million more back into poverty, according to the latest United Nations (UN) commentaries on progress for MDG-1.

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