Telecoms: Gaps amid hopes
In her 53 years of nationhood, Nigeria’s telecommunications sector is un-arguably one of the glaring beacons of hope. Nigeria holds the prime position as the leading mobile telephony market in Africa, with regard to subscriber base and revenue. his tremendous growth, according to industry watchers, has been due to market oriented reforms, the emergence of a quasi-independent regulator and huge foreign direct investment (FDI) into the sector.
In the last three years, FDI in Nigeria’s telecoms sector increased by 38.8 per cent. The industry’s FDI, which stood at $18bn in 2009, grew significantly to reach $25bn currently. At independence, in 1960, the country had only 18,724 telephone lines. Up till 2001 when the telecoms industry was deregulated, Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) could not expand the installed capacity beyond 700,000 lines, thus limiting access to information and communications technology (ICT) in Nigeria.
Today, there are over 116 million active mobile subscriptions in the country. But more importantly, the huge improvements in access to telecoms services have positively affected the quality of life in Nigeria.
People can now contact their folks in most parts of the country from anywhere and businesses can better interact with existing and prospective customers. Nigerians now enjoy services like mobile TV, mobile gaming, electronic payment, affordable internet services, mobile tracking services, cheaper international calls, internet, and mobile banking. Telecom today is a major driver of the economy.
But given all the successes, and positive impact of telecommunications growth, there are still gaps and challenges. Nigeria is still without a law which confers ‘critical national infrastructure status’ on telecoms infrastructure. In addition, the Nigerian government is yet to agree on binding national legitimate taxes and charges for telecoms operators by the different MDAs at federal, state and local levels.
Operators spend significant amount of resources meeting numerous tax requirements. It is a recurrent challenge which impacts negatively on the growth of the industry.
With an achieved penetration of over 60%, the telecom operators appear to have made considerable growth in voice services. However, there are huge gaps in data services.
In today’s changing world, the internet is at the heart of technology evolution. With convergence of telephone, computers and television, the world is now moving to a level where the mobile phone can perform the above three functions with high speed internet access through fibre optics broadband cable.
This is why the Nigerian government has to ensure that the success recorded in the telecom sector is improved with the deployment of full service mobile broadband networks. In this regard, a clear path for future allocation of national frequency spectrum for mobile broadband deployment is required.
The federal government should be aware that spectrum allocation will drive investment in mobile broadband technology and encourage sustained technology upgrades from HSPA/HSPA+ to LTE to the benefits of Nigerian consumers.
Ross Bates, special adviser to government on GSMA, has drawn attention to the need for government and regulators to make plans for auctioning of 2.6GH spectrum to support the deployment of Long Term Evolution (LTE). He added that the government must also start to contemplate the release of low frequency digital dividend spectrum; this would be instrumental in ensuring that rural areas of Nigeria benefit from high bandwidth broadband connectivity.
With a national broadband policy in place, the stage is set for a revolution that will bring internet to the living room of most Nigerians, if the right things are done.
Nigerians are now looking forward to the time when an ordinary man in the nooks and crannies of this country will be exchanging information with people in the city via the internet, where all public places are connected with cheaper and high speed internet. This is the next milestone to be achieved with broadband revolution.