Some 7 terabyte per second bandwidth by the four undersea cables’ infrastructure are unutilized; a classical case of starving in the midst of plenty, Nigeria CommuncationsWeek can now reveal.
Investigations revealed that the entire capacity brought into the country by the submarine cables’ operators stood at 8.0 terabyte per second bandwidth.
A breakdown of the capacity showed that Glo 1 brought in 1 2.5Tb/s; Main One 1.28Tb/s; WACS 3.84Tb/s; and SAT-3 340Gbit/s.
Nigeria CommuncationsWeek also found that of this capacity , Tier 2, Tier 3 operators and big organizations demand 160 STM-1from the available capacity which translates to 24, 800 gigabytes.
Also the use of bandwidth from satellite technology accounts for 20% of the 200 STMs demanded by operators and organizations in the country.
It was further gathered that in spite of the enormous capacity residing at the shores of the country, Nigerians are yet to experience broadband revolution.
Anurag Garg, managing director, Direct on PC, attributed part of the challenges to access.
Garg argued that a typical 3G base station can only deliver 7.2 Mbps and that telcos congest the few available 3G base stations with lots of subscribers which reduces the speed of the internet delivered to them.
He hoped that the situation will change when telcos upgrade to 4G which delivers up to 25Mbps per base station which gives more access to data subscribers.
Direct On PC, Mobitel and Spectranet, some of the surviving internet service providers (ISPs) had recently in a joint presentation to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on 2.3Ghz spectrum, identified access network as one of the challenges of quality of internet delivered to end-users.
According to them, ‘higher bandwidth at access network will result in more capacity up take and resultant drop in prices. Without sufficient bandwidth at front end, even carrier networks are not doing well. Today Nigeria uses only10-15% of its installed international bandwidth capacity. There is similar case with national networks, number of empty ducts, and number of unutilized fiber, all underutilized due to no frontend outflow’.
They noted that, in Nigeria, huge portion of ISP revenue goes towards connectivity charges & tower rentals, because international bandwidth rates are one of the highest in Nigeria compared to rest of the world.
National long distance and metro network cost is exorbitantly high and that tower rental cost is also much higher as compare to other developing countries because infrastructure providers have unique problems like power, theft and security.
More so in a recently released internet data by NCC only 48.1 million Nigerians have access to internet through the GSM technology as at June this year.
A breakdown of this shows that MTN has 24.6million of its subscribers connected to the internet, Airtel has 9.3million, Glo 9.1million and Etisalat 5.1million.
The data also shows that 166,756 subscribers of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) are connected to the internet, out of which Multi-Links has 16,190 of its subscribers are surfing the internet with their phones, Starcomms has 23,167, while Visafone has 127,399 of its subscribers connected to the internet.
