The new Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Aminu Maida yesterday met with the senior staff of the commission, revealing his focus to get affordable and reliable broadband services in Nigeria.
“There is a need to ensure that the NCC strategically focuses on ensuring all Nigerians have access to affordable and reliable broadband services. Part of this is to ensure “effective broadband infrastructure diffusion across the length and breadth of Nigeria,” he said.
While hailing all former chief executives of the Commission for their laudable role in building a resilient telecoms industry, Dr. Maida said the pursuit of improved quality of service on the networks will be one of his priorities, as well as supporting the vision of the Federal Government and the Ministry of Communications, Innovations and Digital Economy.
He said this is because many people are going more digital and virtual in everything they do, putting the telecom infrastructure under much stress. Thus, there is a need to build more robust broadband connectivity that will not only facilitate seamless digital transactions but also serve as the bedrock for e-governance and other socio-economic initiatives.
“As such, we would align with this aspiration to increase broadband penetration to 70 percent and to cover 90 percent of the population by 2025. Therefore, we need to build a reliable telecom industry with impressive quality of service (QoS) indicators with quality of experience (QoE) as our watchword and ultimate goal. This also requires us to address a number of issues such as the Right of Way (RoW) challenge, and ensuring the security of our telecom infrastructure, among others. Efforts must be made to significantly improve service delivery by ensuring the NCC is performance-driven,” he said.
He stated further that, in the Strategic Plan of the Minister, there was a plan to empower three million Nigerians in digital skills and entrepreneurship, adding that this will require the Commission to support Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) as a digital training institution, to be well positioned in driving the government’s agenda on youth empowerment.
