Despite the keenness of some institutions of higher learning to establish effective ICT education programmes; they are confronted with the acute scarcity of broadband internet to achieve these objectives, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.
Bandwidth a major ingredient for telecommunications service delivery has been elusive in the country in terms of cost.
Accurate figures are hard to come by but Dewole Ajao, operations manager, Bandwidth Consortium, said that an institution of higher learning in the country requires about 1,000Mbps of bandwidth per month to effectively drive information and communications technology in the campus.
He said that high cost of bandwidth especially outside of Lagos has made universities and research institutions to resort to prioritizing its use.
“Based on my knowledge of the Nigerian education sector, an average Polytechnic, College or small University has between 0.5 and 10Mbps whether paid for or donated; the more endowed institutions have between 20 and 50Mbps while the really large ones have anywhere between 50 and 500Mbps. All higher education institutions in the country could do better if they had 300 or 500 times the bandwidth they presently have. People just buy what they can afford to buy and hope that they can manage to do something with it. Since you’re asking, 1,000Mbps per institution and a good campus network would be a good start,” he said.
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.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that educational institutions in the country have formed a Bandwidth Consortium to address high cost of bandwidth in cities outside Lagos.
The Consortium which is the brain child of Nigerian ICT Forum is aimed at making bandwidth readily available and cheaper for research and higher institutions of learning in the country.
“This acts as an incentive for the network 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. In the latter part of 2014, 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, stressed the need for the required bandwidth for higher educational institutions and research centres.
According to him, with the launch of National Research Network (NREN) by National University Commission that has got 26 federal universities connected to the network, universities will require bandwidth for its operation.