Nigeria may fail to meet its lofty national broadband
targets due to lapses in the management of frequency spectrum, which has
paved way for gross under-utilisation of this scarce national resource,
market observers have said.
The Federal Government has already set
the target of an 80 percent growth penetration in 3G services by 2018 in
line with the National Broadband Plan (NBP).
This target will remain unattainable because many high-net
worth individuals, agencies of government, as well as,
telecommunications networks without requisite capacity to rollout
services are sitting on huge amounts of frequency spectrum.
Bitflux Communications was awarded the 2.3GHz frequency
spectrum for the provision of wholesale wireless broadband services in
February 2014. The telecoms company is yet to rollout broadband service
across the country.
BusinessDay findings suggest that Nigeria is bound to miss
the June 17, 2015 deadline set by the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) for a global switchover of television signals from analogue
to digital transmission.
This is because the Federal Government has not released
the N60 billion to the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), long
earmarked as the cost of the digital switchover (DSO) process in the
country.
The migration is expected to free up requisite spectrum
under the control of the NBC, providing the needed capacity for telecoms
operators to rollout broadband services. For the second time in about
five months, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has postponed
the proposed auctioning of the 2.6GHz spectrum band ‘till further
notice’, a situation that is frustrating the business plans of
prospective investors seeking to play critical roles in Nigeria’s
broadband market.
Speaking at BusinessDay CEOs forum held in Lagos recently,
Segun Ogunsanya, chief executive officer/managing director, Airtel
Nigeria, said due to explosive growth in mobile data traffic, telecoms
operators required more spectrums to support this growth.
According to him, there had been an
urgent need to expedite the release of frequency to operators in order
to facilitate industry development and enable the nation to meet its
broadband targets.
“Our industry is very spectrum hungry. Spectrum is the
oxygen of this business,” said Wale Goodluck, corporate services
executive at MTN, the nation’s largest operator by market share. “The
more spectrum we get, the better the service we can deliver”, he stated.
Management of frequency spectrum
allocation is handled by the National Frequency Management Commission
(NFMC) chaired by Omobola Johnson, minister of communications
technology.
The allocation of the available national spectrum band to
telecoms is handled by the NCC, which oversees the nation’s telecoms
sector.
Market observers, however, are insistent that the telecoms
regulator should create a spectrum market for better management of this
scarce resource.
“If I have a frequency spectrum today that I bought based
on certain business plan and for some strange reason, my plans are not
working as I already planned, I may choose to sell my frequency spectrum
to someone else,” said Lanre Ajayi, national president, Association of
Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), said.
According to him, such situation could not play out in the
industry due to provisions in the licensing policy. “People are now
asking for such market to be created, where I should be able to sell my
spectrum to an operator that is ready to deploy immediately”, Ajayi said
in an interview with BusinessDay.
Recall that existing operators offering services on the
2.3GHz spectrum band, including Spectranet, Mobitel and Direct-on-PC
(DoPC) had urged the NCC to allocate the remaining slot in the band to
them.
At the time, the three operators were sitting on 20MHz
each of the 2.3GHz band, leaving 40MHz open for licensing. These
remaining slots would have enabled them to eliminate interference – a
major technical issue significantly impairing delivery of efficient
service amongst the three operators.
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