Submarine fibre cable operators in Nigeria are lamenting the under utilization of available international broadband in the country saying less that 10 per cent of the internet bandwidth have been used while the rest are still on at the landing stations onshore while millions of Nigerians in the hinterland are yet to have access to the internet.
Nigeria has Main One Cable, Glo-1, West African Cable Systems (WACS) and South Atlantic Treaty (SAT 3) cables supplying international submarine fibre cable bandwidths to the country in addition to other international satellite bandwidth providers who supply capacities to internet services providers (ISPs) and others.
Ms. Funke Opeke, CEO, Main One Cable said that three years into the landing of submarine in Nigeria from separate cable operators, Nigeria is yet to make maximum use of the cable capacities. Noting that Nigeria has more than enough broadband capacities from several submarine cables, less than 10 per cent of the total broadband capacities from the three cable operators was being utilised in a country of over 160 million persons.
WACS is a 14, 000km submarine cable with a capacity of 5.12 terabits per second (tbps), which berthed in Nigeria May 2012. Glo 1, operated by Globacom, with capacity of 640 Gbit/s, covering distance of 10,000 km from Lagos to UK, connect 17 African and European countries, landed in Nigeria in 2009, while Main One, which landed in 2010, covers over 7,000 km distance from London, with initial landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal.
Comparing Nigeria with other African countries, Opeke said Kenya and Tanzania have gone far in Internet access penetration because the government of those countries built a nationwide infrastructure backbone and allowed the private sector to run it at a determined low cost and that every Internet Service Provider (ISPs) has equal access to available broadband capacities.
Mr. Wale Goodluck, corporate Services Executive, MTN Nigeria said “We need to take it up country. The federal, state and local government needs to support the industry with Rights of Way (RoW) and give us conducive environment to enable us put infrastructure in the ground.” MTN is the single biggest investor in WACS with over $90 million in the cable. In addition, MTN Nigeria is spending $1.3bn into its core, radio and the transmission networks and build more national and metropolitan fibre rings.
Opeke despite cable operators reducing cost of bandwidth in the wholesale market, the retail market, which affects the consumers directly, still operate at high cost of bandwidth. “Government should step in, look at existing infrastructure and set a regulatory policy that will enable people buy bandwidth at a government determined price, instead of each operator building its own backbone and putting its own price,” she said.
In Nigeria, each cable company is building its own broadband infrastructure and fixing prices at will, which in most cases are very high because the operators have to add the cost of building their own infrastructure backbone. According to her, there should be infrastructure framework policy in Nigeria where government would consider existing backbone infrastructure and make the available capacities accessible.
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