The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Pantami has highlighted some of the progress made so far in the implementation of the Nigerian National Broadband Plan 2020-2025.
The Minister, who gave the highlights yesterday at a virtual structured engagement with key stakeholders in the Nigerian Telecom & ICT sector on the new national broadband plan 2020 – 2025, organized by the Association of Telecom Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), noted that the journey is encouraging with significant progress made in realizing some of the targets set in the new Broadband Plan.
He said though, most of the challenges are being addressed, there is a critical need for deliberate efforts by all stakeholders towards ensuring that the targets set in the Nigeria National Broadband Plan 2020-2025 are achieved.
According to the Minister, as at 2019 when the process of drafting the Broadband Plan started, broadband penetration in the country was just over 33%. But as a result of the implementation of the new plan, the broadband penetration significantly increased to 45.07% by November 2020.
This happened because of the Ministry’s engagement with the Nigeria Governors’ Forum in January 2020, which inspired several state governments to adopt the N145/meter and a few of these States even waiving the fee altogether.
Other progress, according to him is the reduction of the average cost of 1GB data from N1,000 January 2020 to N487.18 in November 2020, surpassing the target of achieving N700/1GB by 2023.
With NNBP, the telecommunications sector recorded a growth rate of 15.90% in the year 2020 from 11.41% in 2019 and 11.33% in 2018, making it the highest growth rate in the last 10 years. The NNBP also help to persuade Nigerian President Buhari to direct the security agencies to protect all Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) across the country.
Other progress include:
- An Open Access Model has been developed to support fibre connectivity across the country with the aim of achieving the 120,000km fibre reach. We have had an increase from 47,000km to 54,725km.
- The 3G/4G Base Station Transceivers (BTS) have increased from 30,000 to 53,460. viii. Also, regarding the deployment of the National Satellite Broadband, NIGCOMSAT is in discussion with some operators to provide mobile back-haul solutions to about 1000 sites in the remote underserved areas and the process for getting a backup satellite for Compensation has been initiated.
- A policy has been developed in line with the Duct Network Development/Dig Once initiative to greatly reduce the downtime that results from fibre cuts. There is also a plan towards engaging with other relevant Ministries in this regard.
- We are promoting the efficient use of assigned Spectrum through the enforcement of the “Use it, Trade it or Lose it” Policy on Spectrum.
We have developed draft guidelines on Television White Spaces (TVWS) and the document is undergoing legal review.