Prospects, hurdles for 2009 in Nigeria Technology sector

Ernest Ndukwe

According to BusinessDay, by October 2008, Nigeria's telecom sector had chalked up 58.9 million subscribers,up from under 500,000 in 2001. As at October this year, the country had hit a teledensity mark of 42.13 percent.Industry authorities describe the country as one of the fastest growing in the world as regards to telecoms.

The telecom sector has created tens of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly and many locals have picked up technology skills. Electronic banking and electronic payment systems are riding on the back of the new telecom infrastructure and delivering service through the mobile phone portal.

A lot of valuable man hours are saved daily as people can now get valuable business and other information by making a phone call, as against in the past when on account of poor communication people had to travel long distances just to get the same information.

Ernest Ndukwe, the executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) recently warned telecommunications operators across the country to optimise their networks in order to cope with the volume of traffic expected during the Christmas and New Year festivity periods.

Ndukwe stressed that broadband was the next frontier that needed to be conquered.
"Some of the mobile operators have begun offering services on the 3G platform and subscribers are now able to transmit data across huge wireless bandwidths. Some of the companies have rolled out WiMAX services which are providing broadband services across major cities like Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt.

Ndukwe said it was because of the importance placed on extending broadband services to all parts of the country that the commission initiated the State Accelerated Broadband Initiative (SABI) which from implementation would cover all the 36 state capitals across Nigeria and many of the urban and semi urban centres.

"The rationale behind the SABI project is to provide wireless broadband services in Nigerian cities so as to stimulate demand for Internet services and increase usage, and most importantly, this project is to drive broadband to home at affordable levels", he said.

He said that the Wire Nigeria, (WIN) project being facilitated by the commission to ensure provision of optic fibre cable backbone infrastructure across the country, would also compliment the SABI.

"The idea behind the WIN project is to provide a national backbone infrastructure which will allow multiple operators to hook on at any point to deliver quality broadband transmission services across the country," he said.

For their part, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) experts say that in order to benefit fully from the Internet, Nigeria needs to continuously improve its connectivity infrastructure in order to achieve affordable broadband connections. This is even as emerging market trends show that the most significant factor enabling broadband growth is the existence of alternative infrastructures, in particular cables.

Ndukwe kalu, President, Nigerian Internet Regulation Association (NIRA) observed that Nigeria had done fairly well in the area of ICT but advised that there was the need to take sufficient advantage of the massive wealth generation opportunities which local IT development offers.

He said: "In terms of telecoms, there are two verticals we need to look at here, voice and data. For voice, we have done exceptionally well recording 57 million active lines out of a population of 140 million people. That ratio far exceeds the United Nations Organisations (UNO) ratio for telecommunications penetration."

"For data, statistics show Nigeria has one of the lowest broadband usage levels in Africa with less than 10, 000 subscribers. We are a stage worse than what it was in telecoms in 2001", he added.

Internet domain name, after a long and difficult journey, the Nigerian Internet Registration Association NIRA is set to deliver on a key component of its mandate. Come January 1, 2009 NIRA would commence automated and commercial service. Nigerians all over the world and others interested in the .ng open domain would be able to register .ng domains with instant results. Registrations would be possible through any of the NIRA accredited 29 registrars.

The registrars with online payment systems offer instant domain registrations with domains visible one hour later. Apart from the patriotic appeal every Nigerian has every reason to go for a .ng domain. .ng domains would be one of the cheapest cctlds or gtlds in pricing. Also as a virgin domain many brand names are all available for proper name registration. All these make the .Ng domain a key domain of choice.

Pioneer Accredited Registrars appointed for .ng Registry, after a pains taking evaluation process by the Registrar Accreditation committee, the Executive Board has approved the appointment of the first and only set of 29 Pioneer Registrars for the .ng Registry.

The Registrar Accreditation committee headed by the NIRA VP Mary Uduma had received 35 completed applications for the Pioneer Accreditation process. While all 35 were given provisional accreditation after due assessment only 29 could meet all the set criteria for final accreditation. Of these three had primary office locations outside Nigeria, pricelsy, Senegal, UK and the US.

Electricity, the poor electricity supply in Nigeria is proving a major impediment to the operation and growth of Information Technology and other businesses in the country. This makes it difficult to survive at home or to compete in the global arena. The necessary generation of alternative power adds about 30 percent to the cost of doing business in Nigeria. The three tier of government, federal, state and local have agreed to release $5 billion for the completion of the National Integrated Power Project (NIPP). When this is done, we can have some of the power projects completed in 2009. This should improve generation by about 20 percent. Peak power generation for 2008 was about 3,500 megawatts. Experts estimate that power generation could increase by about 1,000 megawatts in 2009. Government says generation should hit 6,000 megawatts in 2009 by industry experts say it would not likely exceed 4,500.