For some years now, three submarine cables from different operators have been in Nigeria; but their capacities have yet to be maximised, STANLEY OPARA writes.
Main One Cable, Glo 1 and West Africa Cable System are submarine cables that landed in Nigeria some years ago.
But a chunk of the capacities inherent in these cables has remained idle.
Dearth of infrastructure and policy deficiencies are some of the factors that have continued to limit the impact these cables would have had on the people, businesses and the general economy.
For instance, Main One Company, one of the cable operators, still has over 90 per cent idle capacity. Other cable operators, including Glo 1 and WACS (owned by MTN), share similar stories.
Currently, Nigeria has excess broadband capacities from these submarine cables, but the usage of the capacities is being limited because of huge infrastructure deficiencies, which are expected to act as channels through which this ‘essential commodity’ gets to users, which to a large extent, are ready markets.
Glo 1 is operated by Globacom, with capacity of 640 gigabit per second, covering a distance of 10,000 kilometres from Lagos to the United Kingdom, connecting 17 African and European countries.
Main One Cable covers over 7,000 km distance from London, with initial landing stations in Nigeria, Ghana and Portugal.
WACS is delivered to Nigeria by MTN, and has links from Europe, West Africa and South Africa, with bandwidth capacity of over 5.12 terabytes per second and spanning a distance of 14,530 km.
Despite these feats, the availability of broadband is still low, with less than 10 per cent utilisation.
There is still high cost of bandwidth in the retail market. The retail market affects the final consumers directly.
Stakeholders in the market had admitted the reduction of cost of bandwidth in the wholesale market by cable operators; but that is not the case with the retail market.
All other things being equal, a reduction in the cost of bandwidth should cut across both markets given the huge capacities delivered into the country via the submarine cables.
Commenting on the situation, the Business Development Manager, Main One Cable, Mr. Bernard Logan, said when the firm first started selling capacity in Nigeria in 2010, the price of capacity was ‘sky high’, so the smaller businesses were unable to afford such capacity.
“Part of our policy is to try to enable an increased usage of the capacity. So, we have been able to bring prices down by at least 80 per cent since we joined the market in 2010. Our growth has been 300 per cent since we were lit in 2010,” he said, adding that, “we have expanded tremendously, but exactly what percentage of the market is difficult to ascertain, because you will have to ask our customers.”
Logan added, “All I will say is, our expansion plan over the next five years will see us at least taking 30 per cent of the wholesale and enterprise market place. With Nigeria, it’s not so much about today’s capacity; it’s about being able to reach others not experiencing this capacity.
“So, for us, it’s about reaching more towns, terrestrially, to bring more people into the 21st Century. We have over 160 million people in Nigeria and we know that there is only about 15 per cent reach in that number of people, currently either able to be on a mobile phone or use Internet services, so that has got to change and we are certainly one company that is striving to make that change.”
In comparing Nigeria with other African countries, it is glaring that 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 has equal access to available broadband capacities.
But 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 the private infrastructure backbone.
Experts, including the cable operators, had called for an infrastructure framework policy where government would consider existing backbone infrastructure and make the available capacities accessible to operators at reduced cost.
Government has been urged to take charge of the situation by reviewing existing infrastructure and setting a regulatory policy that will enable people to buy bandwidth at a government determined price, instead of each operator building its own backbone and pegging the price.
Amid this below capacity bandwidth utilisation, one of the cable operators, Globacom, recently said as part of its massive expansion project and infrastructural overhaul, which had already started, it will be constructing an additional 4,000 km of optic fibre cable to complement its existing fibre optic facility.
Mid last year, with 45.04 million people using the Internet, Nigeria was named among the 20 top countries of users of the Internet.
According to the usage statistics on the top nations on the Internet, Internet World Stat, Nigeria occupies the 11th position, just immediately after France, which has Internet population of 50.29 million.
Nigeria also comes ahead of Mexico with Internet population of 42 million.
This rating means two per cent of the global Internet population of 2.29 billion people are Nigerians.
On a population estimate of 170.12 million people, Nigeria’s Internet penetration ratio is put at 26.5 per cent. This means that 26.5 persons out of every 100 Nigerians use the Internet.
Despite this feat, the Nigerian Internet market is believed to still have a long way to go as far as getting Internet to the final consumers is concerned. Even the modus operandi of Internet service providers still leaves a lot to be desired.
Calling for an increased government participation in the overall scheme, stakeholders have also called for strategic initiatives that would help encourage Internet awareness, usage and growth in the country.
It is believed that creating demand for bandwidth will reduce redundancies as far as capacity utlisation is concerned.
One of such initiatives expected to spur Internet usage in Nigeria is the establishment of over 228 Rural Information Technology Centres across the nation by the National Information Technology Development Agency.
The RITCs were established to stimulate Internet usage and make Nigerians digital citizens.
Many of the RITCs are located in the rural areas of the country in a bid to reach both the un-served and under-served areas of the country in line with the country’s Millennium Development Goals and the International Telecommunication Union’s directive.
The RITCs were established between 2007 and 2012 in all the geopolitical zones and the agency plans to take the RITCs to all the 774 local government headquarters of the country in the years ahead.
According to NITDA, the RITCs idea is the government’s response toward providing access to the rural populace across Nigeria and making them an integral part of the new global economy driven by ICT.
The agency also noted the deployment of the RITCs had contributed in boosting Internet usage from 2,418,679 users in 2005 to about 10 million users in 2008 and over 44 million users in 2012, thereby positioning Nigeria as one of the fastest growing Internet users in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is expected that Internet users will reach 70 million by 2015 in Nigeria if initiatives like this and others are encouraged.