The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is preparing grounds for a solid broadband plans for the country, insisting that Africa needs a unified broadband strategy.
The Executive Vice Chairman of the Commission, Dr. Eugene
Juwah made this revelation at the recently ended West African ICT Congress in
Lagos and represented by the Director, Public Affairs, Mr. Tony Ojobo.
The Commission, he said, has commenced preliminary studies
and appraisals that would usher NCC on solid ground for full implementation of
a broadband marshal plan for Nigeria.
“What we would stress today is the desire for the industry,
especially the policy makers, investors, service providers, vendors and policy
makers to begin to examine how these would affect the future of our
telecommunications environment, and prepare themselves for the roles they will
need to play for us to realize a collective success,” he said.
The success being envisaged by NCC in the sector, he said,
is not such that only one institution would be expected to deliver.
“When we put broadband in the perspective of cross border
implementation, it calls for harmonization of policies across the states or
nations involved at regional or continental levels,” he said.
Therefore, he said, Africa and Nigeria need to evolve a
uniform inter-regional policy framework such that when broadband is fully
implemented in any of the nations, the benefits could easily spread to sister
nations in the continent.
“A careful appraisal of the growth of broadband in developed
countries can be traced to a semblance of policies accentuated by uniform level
of development in terms of telecommunications and ICT infrastructures,” he
noted.
Lamenting that the same could not be said of Africa where
huge telephone traffic are not exchanged between neighbouring countries on the
continent, when compared with the traffic that such countries exchange with
countries in Europe, America, Asia and the Middle east countries.
“Most African countries are yet to be directly
interconnected, which is the reason why it costs higher to make calls across
the continent than it is to make calls to and from outside the continent,” he
said, stressing that as Africans must collectively pursue a deliberate policy
of liberalization that will attract service providers to go beyond their
immediate environments and also allow interconnection within and among African
countries.
Nigeria, he cited as an instance, has witnessed impressive
investments in the area of submarine optics fibre cable along the coastlines,
yet, there are about four major cables currently.
Ordinarily, Juwah pointed out that if Nigeria taps into the
full potentials of these cables, with its direct connection to the
international super-highway, the country would have achieved a lot in broadband
penetration.
Decrying the fact that these cables have only reached the
coastlines, while majority of the geographical land mass are yet to be
connected because they are mostly landlocked, Juwah urged investors to take
advantage of this by going extra mile to ensure that the rest of the countries’
are connected.
“It could be that such investors may need to be
incentivized, but in what ways? This is where we hope the experts and
stakeholders would come up with the appropriate recommendations that will guide
regulatory actions and policies,” he said.
Juwah emphasized that service providers in Africa appear to
have backed down from an earlier pursuit of deploying to as many African
countries as possible.
Remmy Nweke:
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