NgREN, Consortium to Extend Services to W/African Market

Nigerian Research and Educational Network (NgREN) and Bandwidth Consortium have begun move to extend bandwidth connectivity and network to higher institutions and research institutes in neighbouring West African countries.

NgREN is an initiative of National University Commission (NUC) aimed at interconnecting all federal universities and research institutes to a network that assist in research and other connectivity based projects.

 NgREN also delivers bandwidth to all connected institutions. NgREN is expected to deliver to the connected universities 155mbps equivalent to Synchronous Transport Module, level 1 (STM-1).

But, Bandwidth Consortium is the brain child of Nigerian ICT Forum aimed at making bandwidth readily available and cheaper for research and higher institutions of learning in the country, which include Polytechnic, Colleges of Education among others.

Dewole Ajao, operations manager, Bandwidth Consortium, who confirmed the initiative to Nigeria CommunicationsWeek said that discussion on the modalities which is underway will enable the organisations to create West Africa network where it will be easy for a university in any West African country that connects to the network to share information and also allow Bandwidth Consortium to sale bandwidth to higher institutions in those countries at a cheaper cost.

He noted that the main initiative of the Consortium is aggregating the needs of member institutions and presenting them to the network operators as a single wholesale customer.

“This acts as an incentive for the bandwidth providers basically undersea cable operators, to reduce prices. The reduced pricing then enables us increase bandwidth for our members without being prompted. We also endeavour to build network management capacity among our member institutions. When members join the Consortium, they get to interact with other members and learn together how to better manage their networks as well as best practices in campus network management. We will be extending our focus to highlighting and sharing how to deal with those peculiar network problems that evolve as available bandwidth increases,” he added.

Mohammed Rudman, managing director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, said that the idea of NgREN is aimed at improving collaboration effort among lectures in different universities for research purposes as well as sharing of resource personnel and IT equipment.

He added that NgREN will make it easier for a university that does not have data centre to make use of another university that has it.