Ndukwe Reiterates Commitment to Improved Telecom Access

Dr. Ernest Ndukwe, chief executive officer, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has reiterated the commitment of the commission to ensure that every Nigerian has access to telecommunications services wherever he lives.
He said that as we live in a global village where ICTs have a direct impact on a nation’s ability to improve the economic well being of her people and compete globally, we must therefore ask ourselves how well we have fared in comparison with other regions of the world in providing access to this vital infrastructure for our people. He noted Nigeria no doubt has cause to celebrate eight years of tremendous growth in the information and communication technologies sector.
Ndukwe stated this at the inaugural lecture of African Telecom Hall of Fame a part of 8th Nigerian Information Technology and Telecom Awards (Nitta 2009) organized by IT & Telecom Digest. He said while Nigeria and other African countries may be celebrating increase in access to and the use of basic telephone services, the more advanced countries are increasing access to internet and broadband at such an exponential rate. “Broadband is no doubt an accelerator of social and economic development in the modern world with its applications enabling and facilitating economic and social services such as Public Safety, National Security, Telemedicine, E-government, distance learning, utility applications among others,” he said.
One of the main limitations he said to faster deployment of internet in the continent is the access challenge. “Without access there is no internet. Internet is not real and cannot: be experienced, used or valued by the individual who does not have access. Access for me means being connected to the internet at the right speed and at the right price and linked to the right content at the right time and the right place,” he added.
He noted that many developing countries lost out on the telecom revolution that happened before the advent of mobile communications, when the rest of the world developed copious installed capacities for fixed line transmission and last-meter cable infrastructure. And that, with the coming of internet, the cable infrastructure became the access infrastructure in more developed countries for linking homes and offices to the internet employing ADSL technology. Thus for many developing countries today, mass market last-meter access to the internet has to be wireless.
“It is also important that last meter access is developed side by side with national and regional backbone infrastructure to ensure affordable bandwidth cost and interconnection/peering. Regulators and governments have a responsibility to encourage investment in the building of large capacity optic fibre infrastructure within the nations and across the region,” he explained.
He said "Fibre Without Borders" campaign he launched recently came on the realization that some countries in Africa delay or deny rights of way for cross border or cross country optic fibre cable (OFC) infrastructure projects. He said some countries even deny landing rights to companies seeking to land sub¬-marine cables on their shores. “These are serious policy and regulatory issues that must be addressed. Africa today needs optic fibre highways crisscrossing the continent. This no doubt will help aggregate African data traffic, reduce cost of access, increase regional transit footprints, encourage regional peering, facilitate development of local content and enhance the contribution of Africa to the knowledge resource in the World Wide Web,” he stated.
He stressed the need for  security of access, citing recent development in the country where a major cable cut of the link to the SAT-3 submarine cable infrastructures was recorded, which affected voice and data traffic to and from the outside world. He said although this was an inadvertent and unplanned cable cut, it nevertheless disrupted critical business processes and social interactions. “This brought home the realization that a planned sabotage of unprotected critical communications infrastructure, whether State or privately owned can have far reaching consequences on the business and social life of a country and could grind certain critical activities to a halt and can escalate to disaster proportions.
There is therefore need for regulators and policy makers to encourage the build out of redundancies and diversity in the provision of critical infrastructure and this may include satellite communications ;alternatives, even where cable transmission access are available,” he said.