Poor electricity constitutes 70% of operators' challenges, says ATCON
Author of this article:  By Adeyemi Adepetun and Bankole Orimisan


THE Association of Telecommunication Companies of Nigeria has attributed 70 per cent of the challenges facing operators in the country’s telecommunications sector to unreliable public electricity.

Delivering a keynote address at the association’s broadband investment summit in Lagos yesterday, the President of ATCON, Mr. Titi Omo-Ettu, said power problem has been responsible for high cost of running businesses, which, according to him, has kicked some operators in the sector out of businesses and with little only big operators being able to survive the tides.

The investment forum was the major outing of the implementation of ATCON’s roadmap to sustaining the gains of the last decade and preparing for the next during which the industry is expected to provide access to large population using broadband as toll.

Omo-Ettu, who stated that, getting the current government policies targeted at boosting power generation is critical to the attainment of ubiquitous broadband deployment to galvanise the nation’s economic development, maintained that, although operators face other challenges such as technical issues, poor access to financing, among others, power presents the greatest challenge to the broadband growth.

Industry experts have said that out of over 40 million Nigerians already connected to the Internet; only about 12 million representing around 3 per cent are connected to broadband internet access.

According to Omo-Ettu, “When we weighed the problems which confront our industry as a component of the Nigerian economy, all the issues of low technical skills, poor access to financing, barrier to investment, and all of that, all constitute 30 per cent. It is in finding solution to this 30 per cent that we are gathered to brainstorm and cart a path.

“The over 70 per cent, which is constituted by a poor access to reliable public electricity that refuses to go away can only be left for government to work at sorting out.”

Speaking on the theme of the two-day investment summit: “Broadband as enabler to connecting the next 50 million Telecom users in Nigeria”, Omo-Ettu stated that, having achieved tremendous growth in subscriber base in the last 10 years, broadband should be used to connect the next 50 million subscribers in the next 10 years.

“We have already said we are now done with number of connected lines as index of our industry development. We want to shift emphasis to using number of our citizens who have access to telecommunications index of planning and developing our market.

In the same vein, the Chief Executive Officer of Main One cable Company, Ms. Funke Opeke, who also recognised power problem as one of the greatest challenges to broadband penetration, however, noted that, cost of broadband has dropped by up to 75 per cent in the last one years of international submarine cables landing a year ago.

She added that, “By granting the right of ways to telecom investors at reduced cost, operators would be able to deploy more broadband at reduced cost to Nigerian both at wholesale and at retail levels.”