Bandwidth glut, absence of national backbone, bane of cable companies

Submarine cable companies in Nigeria are currently facing bandwidth glut if feelers from some stake- holders in the ICT industry are anything to go by. The problem ensued due to lack of a national telecommunication, backbone infrastructure provider.  The present irony is that in a country where Main One and Glo1 have joined the SAT3, the living remains of NITEL, to provide broadband Inter-net access, access has not been as less expensive as was expected to be, according to a view expressed by Mrs Funke Opeke, CEO, Main One Cable while speaking recently on an interview session on the Cable News Network (CNN) reported by ATCONNEWS.

She was of the opinion that the present situation had not been significantly different from what it used to be when it was only SAT3 that linked Nigeria and other West African countries to other parts of the world.

“There is more than enough capacity at the coastline where the cables berthed but the infra-structure to take them to every nook and cranny of the country is not there,” a stakeholder volunteered.

Mrs Opeke said “despite the big decrease in wholesale cost, consumers have still not seen a difference in the price they pay,” pointing out that all of Nigeria’s infrastructure was self-provisioned by different retail operators, which kept charging the same prices for the domestic part of the services. 

“The people who own the distribution net-works are not passing on the saving, there’s no open-access distribution or common carriers like you would have in a developed market.

“The lack of a national backbone infrastructure on an open-access basis is also making it expensive to move capacity within Nigeria,” according to Mrs Opeke.

As a result, she said, connecting people from the company’s landing point in Nigeria to London cost less than connecting people across Lagos . “You have to buy that infra-structure from people who own it for their own proprietary use, so it’s a cartel-like situation,” she said. 

She, however, disclosed that Main One cable, which did not sell its capacity directly to homes or small and medium-size businesses, had also started investing in distribution infrastructure, building its own networks when it couldn’t find “commercially reasonable rates.  “The biggest challenge we have is getting the capacity we have in this big pipe that we brought into Nigeria and Ghana across the region to reach the people and businesses where they need the service,” she said.