FG to encourage Investment in Telecoms as ITU Applauds Growth

The Federal government said that it is committed to encouraging investment flow into telecom sector with the aim of attaining 100 per cent  teledensity before the year 2020 in line with Vision 20-2020.
This came as the International Telecommunications Union, (ITU) declared Nigeria as the largest telecom market in the continent with over a quarter of all subscriptions in the continent.
Both government and the ITU spoke at the maiden edition of the Africa Telecom Development Summit which ended in Abuja last week.
Vice President Goodluck Jonathan who was represented by, Dr Shamsuddeen Usman, minister of National Planning as the special guest of honour said although the Internet has developed and become the world’s biggest reserviour of knowledge and has given meaning to the description of the world as a global village, the Internet has its own challenges and it expected that the summit will tackle this in one of its sessions.
The event was chaired by Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, chairman of the African Business Round Table, with participants from other African countries and Nigeria.
Dr. Hamadoun Toure, first African secretary general of the ITU, who delivered the key note speech at the summit said “what is needed now is a major push forward in broadband access, where Africa still lags behind every other region of the world. By the end of last year there were still only 635,000 fixed broadband subscribers across sub-Saharan Africa – or less than a tenth of the population of Lagos.
Dr. Toure who also paid a courtesy visit to Professor Dora Akunyili, minister of Communications, with Ernest Ndukwe, executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, said the situation in Africa is as a result of the dearth of fixed line infrastructure but asserted that mobile broadband may prove to be the answer.
“Indeed, in the five years since the first African mobile broadband services were launched, growth has been far more rapid than in fixed broadband, and by the beginning of 2009 there were over seven million mobile broadband subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa.
He also said “there is also good news concerning international Internet bandwidth, with the opening just last month of a new fibre-optic cable providing more affordable broadband to millions of people in Southern and Eastern Africa – and at least ten further \undersea connections are expected within the next year”.
 Akunyili also briefed Dr. Toure about the efforts that Nigeria is making in the sector, and expressed pride at the level of developmental changes in the country in the past ten years.