Ben Uzor Jr
The federal government is said to be engaging in intense lobbying for additional spectrum from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to enable telecommunication operators in the country provide innovative and reasonably priced broadband services to Nigerians. Bashir Gwandu, executive commissioner, technical services, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), made this revelation in an interview at the Radiocommunication Assembly conference 2012 held in Geneva.
Telecoms operators had earlier expressed concern that majority of the Nigeria’s population especially those who dwell in the rural communities will be denied access to telecoms services due to spectrum unavailability. Available statistics reveal that 40 million Nigerians living in about 850 villages across the country do not have access to basic telecoms services. An analyst told Business Day yesterday that Nigeria’s digital divide is still wide even with Nigeria’s 90 million active subscribers.
According to him, Nigeria needs additional spectrum which could be used by mobile operators to deploy high capacity mobile voice and data services, noting that there was not sufficient spectrum available for the regulator which explains why Nigeria was going to ITU to push for more frequency spectrum resource. “In other parts of the world, there is huge ground infrastructure. In Africa, we rely on wireless. We also have affordability issues which entails capacity to pay for deployment of wireline services.
“The alternative we have is to deploy wireless services. For wireless services, one of the fundamental challenges we have is the amount of spectrum needed to provide the service. Frequency spectrum is very limited resources and we have shortage of it. We have to look for cheaper alternative which involves allocating additional spectrum. Unfortunately, we do not have spectrum that is why we have come to the ITU to ask for more allocation of spectrum that would help us bridge the digital divide.
“So, we have put in a paper calling for more studies. We have put in a draft proposal for additional allocation of spectrum; all of these are skewed towards achieving the objective of getting additional spectrum. On the much anticipated global switch over from analogue to digital broadcasting, Gwandu said much is yet to be done in Nigeria.“Some states have already digitized their transmission, others have not. Digitisation should have been done prior to 2010 but every country has its own challenges.
“Some of the challenges we have are issues revolving around getting the right policy in place to ensure that digitisation takes place. It is very important for us to digitise as soon as possible. Presently, it is difficult to get spectrum licenses for telecoms services. Meanwhile, we have spectrum that is currently not efficiently utilised by analogue TV systems. It has become paramount for us to quickly move towards digital services so that we can free up spectrum for IMT and equally more efficient broadcast services.”
Only recently, the NCC commissioner had reiterated the need for the federal government to request for more spectrum allocation on the 700MHz, which is a befitting spectrum being used for analogue TV. “We said let's digitise our television so that we can have the spectra for telephony services and we are pushing for spectra 690-790 MHz. “At the last conference of ITU (World Radio Conference), we said Africans haven't got Digital Dividend because we have already licensed CDMAs, what is left for us is just 790-806MHz which is 16MHz, which is not going to take us anywhere.
“We said let's extend it to 698MHz that would last for three major operators or an existing operator can buy part of the spectrum and expand their network and still accommodate more people and have better quality service and indeed accommodate the data growth that will come overtime. “This is what we are pushing for at ITU, we are leading Africa in this fight for the next WRC next year and we are going to tell ITU that we want it now, we can't wait any more, the whole of Africa wants it as soon as possible.”
First published on Business Day, Tuesday 24 January, 2012.
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