NaijaWire

Nigeria close to offering full Broadband Internet Services

Lagos - The Nigerian Communications Commission has said that broadband services are at the doorsteps of the country as some operators have begun offering such services on wireless platforms ahead of the State Accelerated Broadband Initiative.

SABI is a scheme designed by NCC to take broadband infrastructure to all the 36 state capitals of the country as well as urban and semi-urban centers.

The Executive Vice-Chairman of the commission, Mr. Ernest Ndukwe, who made this declaration in Lagos at the AFRITEC Forum, organized by ITWorld Magazine. The forum was meant to discuss the future of broadband infrastructure in Nigeria. Ndukwe also disclosed that the commission had freely offered information and communication technology appreciation training to over 4,000 professors and lecturers from tertiary institutions across the country through the Digital Bridge Institute, which was established by the commission.

He said the training was offered to the lecturers under the Digital Appreciation Program for Tertiary-designed to equip the lecturers with the basic computer skills and Internet application to ensure they were equipped to use the facilities to teach and encourage their students.

He said the subject of broadband being discussed at the conference was timely and crucial to the commission, even as the nation celebrated seven years of massive growth in voice telephony, as broadband was the next frontier that needed to be conquered.

He noted that some operators were already on that platform.

He said, “Some of the mobile operators have begun offering services on the 3G platform and subscribers are now able to transmit data across huge wireless bandwidths.

Some of the companies have rolled-out WiMAX services, which are providing broadband services across major cities like Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt.”

Ndukwe also add, “We believe that with the current penetration of phone services across the country, broadband services would be a major catalyst for pervasive application of e-education, e-health, e-commerce, e-government, e-business, and all those e-applications that are available in most developed countries of the world.

“This also means that if broadband infrastructure are made available to users, there will be cost effective use of Internet services as users would spend less time doing their businesses on the net.”

Ndukwe said it was because of the importance placed on extending broadband services to all parts of the country that the commission initiated the State Accelerated Broadband Initiative, (SABI) which would cover all the 36 state capitals and many of the urban and semi urban centres.

“The rationale behind the SABI project is to provide wireless broadband services in Nigerian cities so as to stimulate demand for Internet services and increase usage, and most importantly, this project is to drive broadband to homes at affordable levels,” he said.

The NCC boss said that the Wire Nigeria Project being facilitated by the commission to ensure provision of optic fibre cable backbone infrastructure across the country, would also compliment the SABI.

“The idea behind the WIN project is to provide a national backbone infrastructure,” he said.

Source: The Punch