In most of the sessions at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Telecom World 2014, which ran from December 7-10, in Doha, Qatar, the theme was the same even when the proponents came from over 160 nations and multinational organisations that form membership of the ITU.
ITU, the global ICT regulatory arm of the United Nations Organisation (UNO) turns 150 years in 2015 but looking back, the regulator thinks that the last 20 years or so have been quite eventful especially and Nigeria stands out, primarily because of the telecommunication revolution which began in 2001.
Ordinarily, Nigeria looks fulfilled in terms of voice communication for which so much has been done and achieved in the last 13 years. But Communication Technology Minister, Dr. (Mrs.) Omobola Johnson, says so much more remains undone.
ICT sector: Work in progress
Johnson who led the Nigerian delegation to the ITU Telecom World 2014, and by implication the chief promoter of the Nigerian broadband campaign, agreed with the audience and participants during the four-day event that ICT has now become the next "Oil and Gas," and Nigeria is a gold mine. The Minister reeled out in her presentation statistics to prove that successes have been recorded in ICT, but the sector remains work in progress.
With an estimated population of 170 million, Nigeria is the largest country in Africa and seventh largest in the world. Nigeria is now the largest African economy after the recent re-basing exercise, for which ICT alone contributes over 10 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
The country's active infrastructure projects have a total value close to $100bn. "the ICT industry has significant enabling effect on other sectors of the economy, contributing a combined 2.56 per cent of added value," the Minister said.
According to her, to achieve accelerated roll out of robust, reliable and cost-effective ICT infrastructure to increase citizen access to ICT the following has been put in place: Four Undersea Fibre-Optic Cables with combined design capacity of approximately 10 terabit per second, 100,000 Km of terrestrial fibre-optic cables; approximately 28,000 (2G), 15,000 (3G) transceiver stations; 134 million phone subscription representing 96 per cent teledensity and over 74 million internet users representing 52 percent of the population.
However, she regretted, broadband penetration remains at only six percent, hence the campaign to improve on this side of ICT through deployment of terrestrial fibre optic networks among others.
The minister said government has put in place a national broadband strategy and roadmap that seeks to increase broadband penetration from six percent to 30 per cent by 2018. This will be covered by: 3G/Long Term Evolution (LTE) for up to 80 percent of the population, fixed broadband of about 16 per cent of population based on fibre by 2018 to gurantee minimum download of 1.5 mbps and Open Non-Discriminatory Access.
She maintained that Government is also facilitating increased investments through Spectrum auctions, Regional infrastructure companies (INFRACOS), smart states initiatives to reduce cost of infrastructure deployment; Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) for subsidised access mechanisms for unserved and underserved areas or demographics.
Success stories of non-telecoms companies:
The Minister listed some success stories of non-telecommunications companies to include: IHS Towers which manages over 21,000 towers with 14500 in Nigeria. Only recently it took over 9,151 mobile towers in a deal it struck with MTN Nigeria. "In 2014, IHS successfully raised $2.6bn in debt and equity bringing the total money raised by HIS since 2012 to $4.5bn".
Mrs. Omobola also told the audience that Techno Mobile will establish a factory to assemble phones in Nigeria by 2015. She also listed Resourcery as one of the success story. Its relationship with world enabling technology firms makes it a major partner of Cisco, Microsoft, HP, SAS and Systimax Solutions.
No comments:
Post a Comment