Chairman,
In the last 20 years of GSM rollout, significant transformation has taken place in
In the last 20 years, Nigerians took joint ownership of mobile communication and today it has become our common wealth. I do not see how the world will develop without mobile services and I do not see how
In the last 20 years of GSM,
I want to also thank the government for the political will to license GSM operators in 2000 and for providing the enabling environment for the GSM rollout in 2001.
Certainly, telecoms investments as at 2021, should be quadruple of the
What are the key benefits of GSM to the Nigerian economy since 2001?
GSM transformation in 20 years is a function of rapid changes in technology. Before GSM technology, there was Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology, but all these have transformed to total neutrality of technology, leading to availability of service, quality of service among others, and they have brought about significant improvement on mobile communications. We have transformed from 1G technology, which was the CDMA technology, to 2G, 2.5G, (voice only) 3G, 3.5G, 4G and 5G technology. At the last count,
Today there is no kind of service on the network of developed countries that is not on our networks in
SIM card sales at the beginning of GSM was N20, 000, it later dropped to N17, 000 and today SIMcards are sold for N100 and some operators even offer it free of charge to customers. We started with the macro SIM card, and later moved to micro SIM card and nano SIM card. Today the world is talking about the embedded SIM card, which is eSIM. All these are technology transformation, which clearly shows that as we advance in technology, the devices were becoming smarter, more intelligent and smaller in size. We used to have larger phone batteries that last for few hours, but today phone batteries are smaller in size and last longer. Initially mobile phones come with external antennae but today antennae are embedded inside of the mobile phone, for easy use and carriage.
Early telcos were given five years exclusivity period, and taxes waved within that period. How did the exclusivity period help in shaping the telecoms industry?
The five years exclusivity period offered to early operators by the telecoms regulator must be commended because it was useful and it did three things for the operators. Firstly it led to rapid development of telecoms in Nigerian, because the regulator said it does not want briefcase operators, but operators who were willing to invest in
Without the exclusivity that we had a time in the telecoms industry, the growth we had at that time, would not have been achieved, and we thank the regulator for that foresight. At a point, in order to overcome the challenge of congestion, national roaming licence was considered to enable operators roam to another network that has network capacity in areas where the roaming operator does not have network capacity.
All these helped the rapid development of telecoms in
Collocation has been described as key factor in achieving so much success in 20 years. What is your view about collocation?
Within the first five years of exclusivity period, there was regulatory requirement to build physical infrastructure, but when transformation came and deployment was adequate, the regulator saw a need for co-location and co-sharing, and so the need for operators to build their own physical infrastructure was no longer there, since they can collocate on a single mast and share infrastructure, and that was when outsourcing of building base stations came in place. Private infrastructure companies were licensed to build telecoms masts, where operators could come together to mount their antennae on the same telecoms mast and collocate. This again enabled rapid development, occasioned by the right regulatory environment, right human capital and right sense of ownership.
No doubt, there were some challenges in the past 20 years. What were those challenges?
Despite the progress made in the last 20 years, we still had our challenges in the areas of poor electricity, willful destruction of telecoms infrastructure, multiple taxation, indiscriminate charges, denial to Right of Way (RoW), incessant disconnection of telecoms facilities, among others.
In the area of poor electricity, we are trying to overcome it with the use of alternate energy like solar energy, wind energy, to generate electricity that will power base stations.
We had other several challenges but we were able to weather the storm and came out strong in all of those battles. ALTON was formed as a result of the many challenges faced by telecoms operators.
First we had the battle of connectivity. NITIEL in its days, was all- in-all.
So we needed to invest in a signal converter to convert signals from
By the time GSM was introduced, there became congestion using the single interconnect clearing house. So individual PTOs started connecting directly to GSM operators that have the capacity but do not have the licence of national carrier, and so depended on
In the issue of power, the regulator had promised telecoms operators of 24 hours steady power supply from the national grid within the first five years, and there is a document to that effect, but government failed in that agreement. In that same document, telecoms operators were mandated to rollout 10, 000 base stations in the country but that was achieved within the first one year of rollout. Energy challenges remain unsolved up till today and operators have to find ways to deal with the challenges.
Multiple taxes and denial of RoW have been a major hindrance to network expansion across networks. How were these challenges resolved?
At a time, government started seeing telecoms industry ad extractive industry, rather than contributive industry, and government started imposing all manners of taxes on telecoms operators and was denying operators of access to Right of Way (RoW). All the taxes and denial of RoW, slowed down telecoms growth at some point. So factors like power, multiple taxation, multiple regulation among others, slowed down network expansion, which invariable slowed down telecoms growth.
Security and vandalisation of telecoms facilities also affected telecoms growth.
Cost of RoW became as high as 70 per cent of the project cost, and it became unattractive to telecoms operators, leading to huge broadband capacity in the shores of the country because operators were unable to transmit that capacity though fibre optic cable laying to hinterlands. We took the challenge to the federal government and the
The Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code, which telecoms operators provided to support banking transactions, became an issue between the banks and telecoms operators. How was it addressed?
Yes, there was an issue of unpaid accumulated money that was due to be paid to the telecoms operators by the banks who use the service, but as we speak, there is light at the end of the tunnel for USSD imbroglio, based on the intervention of the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ibrahim Pantami and the Governor of
For 20 years of GSM rollout, subscribers' complain about poor service quality is still on the rise. Why is it so?
Subscribers complaints about poor service quality will continue to be on the rise, so long as we do not have a fully built public infrastructure. If the public utilities are not fully built, there will be poor service quality and subscribers will continue to complain. As long as road construction continues across the country, the tendency to damage underground telecoms infrastructure will be there, and this will lead to outage of telecoms services. So long as government refused to declare telecoms infrastructure as critical national infrastructure, we will continue to experience willful destruction of telecoms facilities across the country, which will disrupt quality of telecoms services. So long as we continue to have national security issues, where operators can not send field workers to manage telecoms cell sites in most parts of the country, we will continue to experience poor service quality. So until our public utilities are fully built, we cannot guarantee uninterrupted service and high quality of service across network, even though it can be mitigated.
The NCC is of the view that access to
Quite a number of our members are able to access the Universal Service Provision Funds (USPF) to drive rural telephony, and the impact is great.
The reason why most operators are reluctant to operate in rural areas, is because of the security issues in those remote areas. So government needs to address the environmental challenges in rural areas in order to create more telecoms impact on rural communities.
How will you describe broadband availability and cost of broadband services across the country?
There are many variables for pricing and it is not possible to solve pricing challenges by regulatory interventions. It has to be driven by market forces. For there to be deregulation of pricing, infrastructure has to be available, and for infrastructure to be available, government has to do a lot more by giving operators access to build infrastructure and support operators in re-building infrastructure, when damages occur. So for us to have ubiquitous and cheap broadband access, we need more infrastructure. So we have enough broadbased capacities on the shores of the country but we do not have the infrastructure like national backbone infrastructure to transmit those broadband capacities to hinterlands, hence the high cost of broadband services in the country.
What is the level of spectrum availability for telecoms service rollout?
For spectrum availability, the frequency management commission has to do a lot more of audit to know the available spectrum that has been licensed and not in use by the operators. For example we have the Tv white channel that has lots of resources that can be used for broadband deployment.
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