FDI, lubricant for sustainable growth in mobile telephony

*Ms Funke Opeke, CEO, MainOne Cable

Chief executive officer of MainOne Cable Company Nigeria Limited, Ms Funke Opeke, has described Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as financial lubricant for sustainable growth in mobile telephony in Nigeria.

Opeke who was forecasting into the five-year Strategic Management Plan (SMP) of the Nigerian telecommunications sector, while dwelling on ‘Broadband Nigeria – The Next Frontier’ noted that resultant increase in investor confidence leads to an abundant inflow of foreign direct investment.

This, she said, provides the financial lubricant required to sustain growth in mobile telephony infrastructure and services deployment in Nigeria based on independent regulation of the industry.

She noted that such evolving regulatory trend supported series of financial incentives, economic regulations and determinations seeking to promote further competition, particularly in the voice telephony market, namely mobile, and to a lesser extent fixed, evident in improved availability, affordability and quality of services to the Nigerian consumers.

The former Chief Technology Officer of MTN Nigeria, also said that this growth so far witnessed in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector has, to a large extent, been restricted to the voice telephony segment of the sector.

“... And has so far failed to extend to broadband and data segments,” she asserted.

Opeke further said that the huge dichotomy between the voice telephony and data segments is evident when statistics are presented.

Pointing out that with tele-density in the country growing from below 2 per cent in 2001 to about 65 per cent within 10 years, the broadband segment is still yet to catch-up.

She said, recent statistics have shown that there are over 45 million internet users in Nigeria, which on the surface appears to be a large.

“This figure represents only 29 per cent of the population,” she said.

With the advent of the Main One and Glo-1 submarine fiber optic cable systems as well as the expected WASC and ACE cables, she observed that Nigeria has sufficient bandwidth capacity to drive the growth of data and broadband penetration.

These cable systems, he said, brought in the potential of delivering fast and affordable international connectivity at speeds far in excess of what was previously available on the NITEL SAT-3 submarine cable system.

To seriously assess the development of broadband in the country, she suggested the scope must extend beyond examining the supply of international bandwidth to the country and move to an examination of the actual penetration in the market, in terms of end user access and penetration.

Remmy Nweke
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