National broadband targets at risk as poor spectrum management persist

Ben Uzor

Nigeria's may fail to meet its lofty national broadband targets due to lapses in the management of frequency spectrum, which has paved way for gross under-utilisation of this scarce national resource, market observers have said. The federal government has already set the target of an 80 percent growth penetration in 3G services by 2018, in line with the National Broadband Plan (NBP). This target will remain unattainable because many high-net worth individuals, agencies of government as well as telecommunications networks, without requisite capacity to rollout services are sitting on huge amounts of frequency spectrum. Bitflux Communications, a relatively inexperienced player in the market, was awarded the 2.3GHz frequency spectrum for the provision of wholesale wireless broadband services in February 2014. The telecoms company is yet to rollout broadband service across the country.

Benuzorreports.com findings suggests that Nigeria is bound to miss the June 17, 2015 deadline set by the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) for a global switchover of television signals from analogue to digital transmission. This is because the federal government has not released the N60 billion to the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), long earmarked as the cost of the Digital Switchover (DSO) process in the country. The migration is expected to free up requisite spectrum under the control of the NBC, providing the needed capacity for telecoms operators to rollout broadband services. For the second time in about five months, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has postponed the proposed auctioning of the 2.6GHz spectrum band ‘till further notice', a situation that is frustrating the business plans of prospective investors seeking to play critical roles in Nigeria’s broadband market.

Speaking at the BusinessDay CEOs forum held in Lagos recently, Segun Ogunsanya, chief executive officer/managing director at Airtel Nigeria, said due to explosive growth in mobile data traffic, telecoms operators require more spectrum to support this growth. According to him, there is an urgent need to expedite the release of frequency to operators in order to facilitate industry development and enable the nation meet its broadband targets. "Our industry is very spectrum hungry. Spectrum is the oxygen of this business", said Wale Goodluck, corporate services executive at MTN, the nation's largest operator by marketshare. "The more spectrum we get, the better the service we can deliver", he stated. Management of frequency spectrum allocation is handled by the National Frequency Management Commission (NFMC) chaired by Omobola Johnson, minister of communications technology.

The allocation of the available national spectrum band to telecoms is handled by the NCC, which oversees the nation’s telecoms sector. Market observers however are insistent that the telecoms regulator should create a spectrum market for better management of this scarce resource. "If I have a frequency spectrum today that I bought based on certain business plan and for some strange reason, my plans are not working as I already planned, I may choose to sell my frequency spectrum to someone else", said Lanre Ajayi, national president, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON). According to him, such situation cannot play out in the industry due to provisions in the licensing policy. "People are now asking for such market to be created, where I should be able to sell my spectrum to an operator that is ready to deploy immediately", he said in an interview with Benuzorreports.com.

Recall that existing operators offering services on the 2.3GHz spectrum band, including Spectranet, Mobitel and Direct-on-PC (DoPC) had urged the NCC to allocate the remaining slot in the band to them. At the time, the three operators were sitting on 20MHz each of the 2.3GHz band, leaving 40MHz open for licensing. This remaining slots would have enabled them eliminate interference – a major technical issue significantly impairing delivery of efficient service – amongst the three operators.