Towards the Development of a Robust National Information Infrastructure for Nigeria

By

Usman S Goni, PhD

Virginia, USA

usgoni@gmail.com

December 1, 2007

Nigeria had in the recent past recorded a phenomenal growth in its telecom sector due largely to the unprecedented upsurge in demand for wireless services delivered on the platform of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). The major impetus that propelled that growth was the government’s deregulation of the telecom industry spearheaded by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) as well as the keen participation of both domestic and foreign telecom firms supported by local and foreign direct funds in what was tagged "the fastest emerging telecom market in the world". The foreign investments were encouraged by the government’s economic reform policies that paved the way for privatization in several economic sectors including telecommunications.  On the basis of this development, the World Bank under the auspices of International Financial Corporation (IFC) advocated and offered direct funding for the Telecom sector especially wireless infrastructure deployments thus making the business case for the wireless sector to take off in a country with the lowest teledensity in the world as well as the highest population density in Africa. No doubt, the basic ingredients for a successful wireless network business is entrenched by the dearth of basic telecommunications services in a heavily populated country endowed with significant natural and human resources backed up by decent economic and social activities.

The mobile wireless sector has been and will continue to be the growth engine of the telecommunications industry, as this is a global trend now well established in developed as well as emerging economies.  Despite this positive trend in the growth of its wireless sector, the limited availability of landline-based or fixed wireless broadband networks and services significantly impacted the pace of Information Communications Technology (ICT) developments in Nigeria. The fixed wireless or wireline sector mostly serving the residential, enterprise and government offices have been lying fallow with marginal increase in its customer base. Current subscriber statistics recorded by the NCC and illustrated in Figure 1 attests to the widening growth gap between mobile wireless (GSM) and the fixed wireless/wireline segments of the telecom market. The continued decline in service delivery by NITEL in the last decade despite incessant injection of capital to ameliorate its numerous problems contributed immensely to the slow takeoff of Information Technology (IT) vis-à-vis Internet and other information networking applications, which are among the essential bedrock of socio-economic developments of any nation in areas of government, medical, scientific, and business activities.

In an attempt to create a competitive environment that will promote innovation and other developments in the long distance telecom sector, NCC had issued licenses to several firms as “Long Distance Operators” (LDO). In addition to that, a Second National Carrier License was also issued to Globacom (in addition to a GSM license).  The 2^nd national carrier license was probably more important to improving telecom services targeting interconnect and trunking capacity which would help increase access to interstate and international markets. The lack of proper enforcement of licensing policies geared towards an all inclusive development of the sector (other than wireless mobile or “GSM”) led to this lopsided development within the sector, such that capacity was built around mobility and the aggregation points of directing traffic to various destinations including international gateways remained underdeveloped. Consequently, quality of services degraded since calls between different wireless operators needed to interconnect much in the same way as road highways interconnect towns and cities.  Although Globacom is currently deploying extensive optical fiber lines across the country (which is really great), the major thrust of their network infrastructure at the beginning was their GSM network rollout.   With this shifted focus, the landline, long distance sector remained underserved, which continued to affect the country's development in no small way, especially in the spread and efficacy of Internet penetration.

There are several other facets of telecommunications technology that Nigeria needs to tap into so as to close the digital divide, hence speeding up the development of the nation towards a knowledge-based society. This includes fiber-based backbone networks which interconnects points of presence of telecom facilities and transmission hubs. Such an infrastructure outlay already exists in some way and most probably underutilized. The NNPC optical fiber network which was extensively deployed through a major portion of the country can be leveraged to help distribute bandwidth capacity to businesses, universities and colleges, government and communities where Internet access can be afforded. This way, Nigeria can begin to move towards bridging the digital divide in the near term. Consequently and in the long term, new business paradigms (such as remote call centers as outsourced customer service support units for major multinational corporations) will eventually be established. This was essentially how India began to host customer call centers as outsourced support units for businesses in Western Europe and America.   The economic benefits of outsourcing in ICT and related support services is a substantial contributor to the GDP, as this alone launched India to be a major outsourcing market of major multinational corporations.

In yet another example, the success of India today in both academia and technology contributing immensely to the global economic engine is well entrenched in their early adoption of information technology enabled by good telecom infrastructure.   Today more than 50% of the high technology firms in Silicon Valley have Indians that graduated from strategically established Indian Institute of Technology (IIT's) as their key employees and Research and Development experts.   Again the telecom infrastructure linking India’s ivory towers of technology with libraries and R&D centers in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas provided proximity to learning tools, literature and a platform (the Internet) to create, innovate and invent in several areas of science and technology.  Although several tertiary institutions in Nigeria now train engineers and scientist in IT, there aren’t enough platforms to launch their careers and move them to the next level where they can independently create these new business paradigms such as product development and outsourced software services.  Establishing a robust national information infrastructure policy that will enable the spread of high-speed Internet could move Nigeria forward enabling us to replicate similar developments that India benefited from IT.

Although the wireless sector will continue to dominate in terms of ubiquity and popularity due to its portability supporting subscriber mobility, it is not cheap enough and  adequate enough to fulfill the ICT development requirements that will pave the way for Nigeria to partake in global information transformation of business, healthcare delivery, collaborative research in science, technology, arts and economics. The argument posed here does not vitiate the already established robustness of wireless technology in meeting the needs of e-commerce, and e-government, however the current wireless infrastructure layout in Nigeria is par excellence voice driven with some support for medium data delivery. The type of applications that runs on the GSM network (including its evolved general packet radio services otherwise known as GPRS) include emails with small attachments and other multimedia messaging services. Further evolution to this involves additional infrastructure deployments that are costly and probably not ready for primetime in Nigeria[1]. With that said the void in affordable high-speed broadband data networks and services that will enable ICT development still remains elusive to most Nigerians.

The NCC has done a great deal of work in promoting the development of the wireless sector, bringing to Nigerians the so many opportunities that come with wireless. This has not only increased on the efficacy of getting things done, but also in cost savings and arguably protecting lives.   NCC should continue to work towards improving on the work that they started by ensuring that the services rendered are of near comparable grade as obtainable in other parts of the world, at least those with similar economic and social dispensation as Nigeria.   However, there have been complaints of recent, that the wireless services have degraded significantly in comparison to the early days when these networks were launched. The problems have been reported in leading Nigerian Newspapers as multifaceted and not well investigated. Taking an engineering approach, the network issues can be investigated by proper logging of customer complaints (typically involves collating the problems, grouping them and statistically analyzing specific patterns, technically referred to as trending, and using best practices to correct them.) With this first valid approach to proving and solving the problems, the performance of the network in call handling can be enhanced greatly with little investments in engineering time.

On a larger scale, a network "audit" can be performed wherein a complete review of the network size and processing power is assessed in relation to the number and density of subscribers that the network currently serves. The basic idea here is that a simple coverage solution may sometimes not work, to the extent that the network needs to be expanded in terms of additional infrastructure elements (base stations, switches and routers). The question is, have all these been done to uncover the issues and address them, and if necessary to at least inform paying subscribers of the problems and proposed solutions to that effect?  There are several metrics by which the quality of service (QoS) of a wireless system can be gauged and improved upon if found to be below target objectives. Radio network optimization engineers earn a living by tirelessly measuring these quality metrics and analyzing them within the network engine to determine tunable levels that will ensure calls quality and hence subscriber satisfaction of service delivery.

In order to protect the paying subscriber and to promote even development and deployment of national infrastructures, especially in wireless telecom, requirements for coverage are usually stipulated by the regulator with clearly laid timelines for such a service reaching a given geographic and demographic entities. For example, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States often sets coverage profiles for each national licensee ("the operator") to cover a geographic proportion (such as 70% of the country or 60% of the population) with wireless service within a given timeframe (e.g. 5 years after license allocation). That way, the regulator can measure at appropriate times, the fulfillment of such requirements and the failure to comply may typically include penalties that are tied to the level of degradation, and with a warning count that ultimately leads to license forfeiture if conditions are not met. There are several regulatory schemes that may be developed and enforced to help with the spread and reliability of wireless services within geographic and demographic areas. 

Along the same line, the national carriers and long distance operators should be obligated to provide links between the fiber hubs or termination points and the residential areas, business districts and market centers, as well as industries and educational institutions.  It is not cost effective to have Universities and other tertiary institutions, banks and business centers, as well as government offices and secretariats individually deploy Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSATs) to backhaul Internet traffic. It is just as uneconomical as having every house install their generators to get just the energy they need for their day-to-day activities. The establishment of NigerComSat by the Federal Government could have been geared to fulfill some of this role, and essentially pave the way for better telecom trunking in Nigeria. Network operators such as the mobile wireless companies and other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) spends a decent size of their operational costs on backhauling calls and data traffic from their hub locations to switching centers as well as the all-one destination: the Internet.  Therefore ensuring a decent optical fiber network run through major commercial hubs and state capitals with an equally decent capacity will have multi-pronged economic benefits in the immediate and long terms for the nation.

On a much broader scale, Nigeria is rebuilding several of its infrastructures including power, transportation among others, and these laudable efforts should include telecom infrastructure (fiber, fixed wireless broadband, etc) as well as promote the development of local content in the telecom services sector. The importance of a vibrant information infrastructure and services delivery in relation to economic, social and scientific development of any emerging economy cannot be overemphasized.   Equally important is the timing of such a policy to pave the way for an early start towards creating an Information Technology focused economy equipped with the most optimal telecom infrastructure as part of the fuel that will propel Nigeria to meet its development goals by 2020.

Dr. Goni is a Principal Investigator, Analyst and Wireless Technology Lead at Northrop Grumman Corporation, USA.