Why Nigeria may not benefit from submarine cable systems

Why Nigeria may not benefit from submarine cable systems
Ben Uzor Jr
With the plethora of submarine cable systems expected to hit the shores of Nigeria by 2011, the federal government has remained flaccid in the area of encouraging investments geared towards strengthening and constructing national and cross-border fibre transmission backbone needed to aid distribution nationwide. Industry experts who spoke to BusinessDay have criticised the governments’ approach, labeling it as counter-productive to economic development as majority of the Nigerian population would still be denied access to ‘true’ and affordable broadband services. According to them, the immense bandwidth emanating from these cables would remain under-utilised and only serve the coastal areas therefore no significant improvements in Nigeria’s penetration rates. Available data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reveals that out of about 140 million Nigerians only 11 million (7.4 percent of the population) have access to the internet. Low broadband access, experts have said accounted for the snail-speed growth of the internet not only in Nigeria but across the entire African continent. Lanre Ajayi, president, Nigerian Internet Group (NIG) who also spoke with Business Day in a telephone conversation expressed concerns about insufficient adequate national fibre optic backbone to complement the cable initiative landing in the country. According to him, both can engender positive changes in experiences in the telecoms industry. Ajayi further observed that the national fibre transmission backbone would assist in pushing bandwidth to the hinterland adding that it would advance the adoption of e-government, e-health and telemedicine, e-payment, e-learning. This would further imply that Nigeria would be able to embrace and court emerging and major convergent technologies such as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), LTE (Long Term Evolution). To further buttress Ajayi’s opinion, Steve Evans, chief executive officer, Etisalat Nigeria who spoke to BusinessDay exclusively said: “Over the next two years there would be a lot of international capacity going to come on stream in Nigeria. The challenge is then ironically going to be do we have the backbone networks in the country to have sufficient bandwidth to take advantage of that.” He posited: “And also, have we got sufficient capacity in our radio network in order to take advantage of that new international capacity. I think today, the answer is that we probably haven’t got the capacity either in the radio networks or in the backbone transmission networks to really take advantage of the international capacity that is going to come available. So, clearly it is an area where government needs to try to encourage operators to invest more heavily going forward”.
Meanwhile, countries in Central Africa are already becoming proactive as regards tapping the huge cable potentials on the West African coast, BusinessDay can now reveal. The Chadian government has embarked on a fibre backbone project financed by the World Bank using existing fibre routes along the length of the Kome-Kribi oil pipelines and of building extensions to their capital, N’Djamena and to the Central African Republic. The project would allow both Chad and Central Africa Republic access to international fibre bandwidth on the west coast rather than being solely reliant on relatively expensive and not always reliable satellite bandwidth.