11 M Nigerians Scramble for 30 SPMs

Only a paltry 30 SPMs bandwidth is available to the about 11 million Internet users in the country resulting in the slow and sometimes frustrating access to the information superhighway, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can now reveal.
Out of the available SPMs, 12 is from South Atlantic undersea cable (Sat-3) and held by beleaguered Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (Nitel), 8 is from Suburban Telecom, another 5 SPMs are purchased from Single Channel Per Carrier (SCPC) while the remaining 5 are sourced from satellite communications capacity (Vsat).
SPM-1 is the standard measurement in transmission for demand on fibre channel of bandwidth. A typical SPM-1 has speed of 155 Megabyte per second on the fibre optic and it is provided via International Private Leased Circuit (IPLC).
Telecommunications operators demand undersea cable infrastructure for data, Internet and video service provision. They also demand bandwidth from satellite communications mode.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that MTN Nigeria is the biggest single user of bandwidth in the country as at today as the company’s bandwidth demand is put at 2 SPMs.
Other telecom operators, internet service providers (ISPs) and financial institutions use varying amount of the remaining bandwidth to provide services to the end users.
When more than half of the 11 million end users are online at the same time, access to the Internet drops to snail crawl.
The SPM is expected to increase tremendously soon, when initiatives such as Glo 1 and MainOne fully come on stream while also driving down the cost of Internet.