Universities Hungry for Bandwidth 8 Months after NgREN

Federal universities are still battling with bandwidth capacity to fuel further research and education in spite of the launch of Nigeria research and educational network (NgREN), to provide cheaper bandwidth for member institutions and efficient network infrastructure to the research and education community.

NgREN is an initiative of the National Universities Commission (NUC) with the support of the Committee of Vice-chancellors (CVC), the Nigerian University System (NUS) and the Ministry of Communication Technology to also provide network services and applications to promote linkages and collaborations between the research communities and leverage technology to promote new trends and innovative ways of teaching and learning

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that while NgREN is expected to deliver to the connected universities 155mbps equivalent to Synchronous Transport Module, level 1 (STM-1), some of the universities in the country are getting 70 percent while others get as low as 10 percent.

An official of NgREN said that transmission issues are responsible for their inability to deliver to some connected universities as much as they deliver to others.

The official said that NgREN was working hard to address the challenges.

Also, the cost of the delivered bandwidth has compounded the problems because the price was supposed to be 40 percent off the market price, but today bandwidth is sold at market price.

This it was learnt has necessitated the move by members to access Tertiary Educational Trust Fund (TETF) to pay for the bandwidth.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that bandwidth was supposed to be made available to 27 Premier federal universities in Nigeria and their over one million students and staff under its first phase.

Future phases of the project shall include the deepening of research and education content through partnerships with global research and learning content providers and also expanding the network to include all Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of education Nationwide.

Meanwhile, NgREN is in discussion with Bandwidth Consortium on collaboration in the areas of technical capacity at the universities.

Dewole Ajao, operations manager, Bandwidth Consortium, said when the partnership is consummated, Bandwidth Consortium which 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 will be response for training network engineers that will be managing NgREN network at various universities as well as resolving internal networking issues at the institutions.

Mohammed Rudman, managing director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, said that the idea of NgREN a National University Commission project 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.

“It will guarantee security communications among connected universities as such communications will not pass through the global internet,” he noted.