NCC Assures Improvement in Telecom Services
Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) has assured that it would continue to put pressure on telecom operators in the country to provide optimal services to customers.
Eugene Jumah, executive vice chairman of the commission, gave the assurance in a message to the 62nd edition of the NCC Consumer Outreach Programme, held at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Kaduna State.
Represented by Dr Femi Atoyebi, deputy director, Consumer Affairs, Juwah said the commission would sanction any service provider for unapproved increase in tariff and poor services.
He allayed the fears that the use of mobile phones have adverse effect on the health of users, saying the claim has no scientific basis.
“There has not been any scientific proof that radiation from mobile phones is harmful to the health of subscribers,” he said.
According to him, all telecommunication masts have recommended heights, to which the commission always ensured strict compliance to prevent harmful radiation from getting down to human beings and animals around.
“As it is now, for someone to be affected by radiation from masts, that person must have climbed the mast naked.
“If such radiation is so harmful, all the people in United State of America would have died, because they have been using it a long time ago,” he said.
He said the consumer outreach programme was aimed at bringing together telecom service providers to address some of the challenges of their subscribers.
“It is an avenue to rub minds on issues developing within the telecom industries.
“We give opportunity to the customers to have a voice to ask many questions, and it is a forum for the commission to also make enquiries and if possible make suggestions on how to move the industry forward,” he added.
E-Financial
MoneyMaster PSB Marks 2024 Global Money Week
MoneyMaster Payment Service Bank Limited (MMPSB), Nigeria’s payment service bank, is joining blue chip companies and other corporate entities across the globe to celebrate the 2024 Global Money Week from March 18 to 24, 2024.
In a press statement issued on the celebration, MMPSB emphasized its commitment to the provision of top-notch banking services to its customers at all times, including payment services through wallets, savings, individual and business accounts, as well as provision of a platform for customers to buy airtime/data, pay bills and subscribe to cable television, amongst others.
MMPSB said its plans for the week include a “Catch them Young” experiential campaign to tutor kids on the need to embrace savings and investment culture. An estimated 5,000 students from across major schools in Nigeria have been programmed to participate in the week-long financial literacy training in the bank’s coordinating centres across 10 states.
Besides this, the MoneyMaster team will also engage teachers and enlighten them on basic knowledge of savings and investment for future purposes.
The bank added, “As part of the week-long celebration, MoneyMaster PSB will also be releasing thought leadership videos on safety and security on how banking customers can protect themselves. These videos will be shared to its customers via direct email and also on its social media handles for the benefit of the general public”.
The week, celebrated annually, creates global awareness-raising campaign on the importance of ensuring that young people, from an early age, are financially aware, and are gradually acquiring the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour necessary to make sound financial decisions and ultimately achieve financial well-being.
“Protect your money, secure your future”, the theme for this year’s celebration, is focused on safe money management, underscoring the importance of adopting a responsible and informed approach to personal finance, by being aware of potential risks in the financial sector and protecting one’s hard-earned money.
Telecom
WIOCC’s Strategic Role in Addressing Subsea Cable Outages
WIOCC, Africa’s digital backbone, is leading the continent’s response to the cable cuts currently affecting the WACS, ACE, Main One and SAT3 subsea systems on Africa’s western seaboard.
WIOCC’s highly resilient network, with hyperscale capacity on every major system is the largest in Africa and ideally placed to swiftly deliver restoration solutions to hyperscalers, fixed and mobile carriers, internet service providers and other clients, enabling them to quickly re-establish key traffic routes into, within and out of Africa, thereby minimising performance degradation for their end-customers.
According to Chris Wood, Group CEO of WIOCC, “Immediately the four subsea cables were severed off the coast of Cote d‘Ivoire our engineering, operations and field teams swung into action.
“They have been working tirelessly for the last 48 hours with our strategic network partners and equipment suppliers and will, within the next 24 hours, have activated an unprecedented additional 2 Terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity across the unaffected cables in our network to support the capacity needs of other network operators and hyperscalers.
“Our clients connected directly at Open Access Data Centres (OADC) data centres in South Africa and Nigeria are already protected from the impact of the subsea outages due to the unique levels of redundancy and scale of the WIOCC core backbone.
“In Lagos, the Equiano cable, in which WIOCC owns a fibre pair, has not been affected by the incident off Cote d‘Ivoire. WIOCC lands the cable directly into the OADC data centre, establishing the most resilient digital ecosystem hub in Lagos and offering the most direct connectivity to Europe and South Africa.
“As a result, OADC’s data centres and WIOCC’s hyperscale network are playing a key role in restoring services to other facilities and operators currently suffering outages in Lagos and elsewhere on the continent.”
“Our priority is to ensure minimal disruption and maximum resilience for our clients,” added Ryan Sher, Group Chief Operating Officer at WIOCC.
“We have invested heavily in deploying diverse, highly-scalable national and international connectivity to support the uptime requirements of our wholesale client base. Investing at scale means that we consistently carry extra capacity, ensuring we are able to rapidly turn up or re-route capacity to address unexpected network disruptions.
“It also enables us to deploy short-term restoration solutions for other operators on a case-by-case basis. Any service provider affected by these outages, whether an existing WIOCC client or not, is encouraged to contact us to explore options.”
WIOCC’s policy of strategic deployment of converged, open-access digital infrastructure at a hyperscale level and delivery of unrivalled resiliency, enables it to meet and anticipate the needs of Africa’s wholesale community with sufficient scale and network diversity to address even the most challenging situations.
News
Coronation Report Reveals Key Role of Private Sector to Nigeria’s Infrastructure Funding
The maiden edition of Coronation group infrastructure report has revealed that the private sector has a critical role to play in infrastructure funding in Nigeria.
The report stated that the key to private-sector infrastructure investment is for dealmakers to structure transactions that offer attractive returns combined with an acceptable degree of risk, the risk often being eased by agreements supplied by infrastructure investment vehicles such a Infracorp.
The report said that the investor base can play its part, providing liquidity as part of its own efforts to create long-term returns with low relationship with public markets.
The report noted that Nigeria’s future infrastructure development depends on private capital, including capital allocated to Public Private Partnership (PPP) ventures, given the huge amounts of money required and the inability of government to provide it.
The report explained that the record of the federal government in capital expenditure over several decades highlighted the need for increasing private-sector investment, adding that public expenditure on transportation, education, hospitals, power, housing, and other essential infrastructure has not kept up with the needs of a population growing at a long-term rate.
The report said Public-private partnership differs from government capital expenditure in that it must pay for its capital, noting that it must attract private sector capital and therefore provide better returns than the risk-free returns of government debt.
According to the report, “Inflows of petro-dollars into government coffers did not translate into proportionately more being spent on capital expenditure, surely a missed opportunity. Still worse was to follow in the period 2011-2020 when the average level of public sector capital expenditure fell to 1.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”
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