Experts Says Nigeria’s Broadband Target is Unrealistic

The 30 percent broadband penetration target set by the Federal Government by year 2018 is not realistic, an industry expert, Iqbal Bedi, has predicted.

To ensure that the country continues to make progress on the broadband agenda, he advised that the Federal Government needed to review the target date, make public subsidy available, and consider a range of alterna­tive technologies to improve the development of Nigeria’s broad­band infrastructure.

Bedi, a Principal Analyst at Analysys Mason, in a forecast on the state of broadband penetra­tion in the country, which spans 2013–2018 targets of 21per cent (2015), 42 per cent (2018) and 76 per cent (2020), based on mobile broadband are overly ambitious broadband targets are unlikely to be met.

According to him, given the levels of broadband take-up that have been achieved to date, the targets were over-ambitious and unachievable noting that the tar­gets can be met through market investment alone, and so there will be a need for significant gov­ernment subsidy.

He explained that the national broadband target for 2015 is high­er than the forecast take-up of 3G and 4G services adding that the gap between Analysys Mason’s forecast of mobile broadband take-up and the NNBP targets widens significantly in 2018 and 2020.

As a result, he said that the new government needs to revise the broadband targets down­wards so that they are more re­alistic stressing that the “they must be sufficiently ambitious to ensure that development of Ni­geria’s broadband infrastructure does not fall behind that in other African countries.”

Bedi’s forecast suggested that in order to determine the level of public funding required for subsi­dising the development of broad­band infrastructure, the govern­ment can undertake a detailed and iterative process involving broadband infrastructure cover­age analysis and financial model­ing.

The forecast revealed a range of initiatives that are available to encourage investment in mobile networks saying that meeting the 2018 and 2020 targets would require significant investment in broadband infrastructure, par­ticularly in rural areas or in areas deemed to be commercially unat­tractive.

The expert disclosed that to en­able a higher rate of broadband take-up, mobile operators (who are leading the development of broadband in Nigeria) will need to make significant investments in fixed (fibre) and 3G and 4G in­frastructure, particularly outside urban areas where 3G coverage is most concentrated.

He noted that the InfraCo ini­tiative alone is unlikely to pro­mote the development of wireless networks saying that govern­ment should consider encourag­ing network sharing, funding for the development of passive in­frastructure in areas that would otherwise be commercially un­viable and promoting the use of innovative technologies such as TV whitespace which makes use of licence-exempt UHS spectrum and benefits from the strong propagation characteristics ex­hibited by UHF spectrum, and so requires fewer base stations to cover a given area.