ATCON President, Olusola Teniola

The President of Association of Telecoms Companies of Nigeria, Olusola Teniola has called for collaboration among governments, Civil Society Organisations and the private sector to ensure continuous increase in broadband penetration if we must meet up with the new timeline of 70 per cent broadband penetration by 2024.

Teniola who spoke at the sideline of the 10th West Africa Convergence Conference, WACC 2019 themed: Regulations Disruptions Employability Entrepreneurship and Convergence Broadband and Broad Plan, noted that discussions should be ongoing and policies adapted to the digital reality

According to him, “digital is now, data is the key ingredient and broadband is the vehicle to drive all that. Broadband should be a right but we’re not there yet”.

He reiterated the fact that Nigeria needs more speed in terms of broadband because “in Nigeria it hasn’t really been about speed but how much data one can consume, so in this regard people are still struggling with broadband speed”.

“If you look at the broadband plan that just ended, it was written in 2012. We spoke about infracos already being activated and the assumption was that we would already have rolled out quite a high percentage of fibre to various communities by 2016, but it’s 2019 and they’re yet to roll out a single kilometre of fibre to that programme, we’re behind”, he said.

“We rely heavily on LTE deployment and we’re encouraged by what the MNOs are doing. But we also need an underlying infrastructure to support the last mile which predominantly is the LTE and then we have to prepare for 5G which is a broadband and fibre story because if you do not have the fibre there then the back hall cannot actually contain and manage the speed that 5G would bring in 2025”.

Story by: Theresa Igata