One of Nigeria’s telecommunications services providers, Airtel Nigeria experienced at least 400 fiber cuts every month, the company Ag. Chief Technical Officer, Dr. Adedoyin Adeola has disclosed.
The cable cut, according to Dr. Adedoyin is as a result of road constructions, where contractors from both the Federal and State Ministry of Works arbitrarily dug out fiber cables without minding the havoc being caused to the network operators and ultimately, the subscribers.
“One of the challenges Airtel as a network provider face every day is the issue of fiber cable cut. At Airtel, we experience at least 400 cut to our underground cable every month due to road construction,” he disclosed while making a comment yesterday at a stakeholders’ consultative forum on the draft information memorandum for the 3.5GHz spectrum auction, organized by the Nigerian Communications Commission.
He argued that except this challenge is addressed, operators may be skeptical about their return on investment if infrastructure on 5G is deployed.
Calling on the federal government to urgently implement the Critical National Infrastructure Act to deal with the issues of frequent fibre cuts, infrastructure theft and vandalization of telecom infrastructure, the Airtel CTO believes that the resources being used by network providers to fix those damaged cables can be invested to boost network services in the country.
“5G is a welcome development, but there is a snag. The Critical National Infrastructure Act must be implemented to send signal to contractors, who arbitrarily uproot cable in the name of road construction. Without this, operator may be skeptical about investing in 5G,” he warned.
The Nigerian Communications Commission had yesterday organized the Stakeholders’ Consultative Forum on the Draft Information Memorandum for the 3.5GHz Spectrum Auction for the Deployment of 5G Services, in preparation to join the nations that are already harnessing and harvesting derivable benefits of the Fifth Generation (5G) Networks.
The essense of the forum is to rally stakeholders to take a final decision on the planned auction of the 3.5GHz spectrum to be used to deploy 5G services in 2022.
