Former president, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) and CEO of Teledom Group, Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem, while assessing the Nigeria’s ICT development in 2011, reiterated the need to encourage local content developments in 2012, if the sector must live up to expectation. He spoke with ADEYEMI ADEPETUN

Year 2011 has come and gone. In the ICT sector, there were so many issues to talk about. From your perspective, how will you access the sector in the year that just went by?

The Nigerian ICT sector continued to witness a lot of growth in 2011. Our ICT industry is one of the fastest growing in the world and certainly the fastest in Africa.

First, the industry rose to the occasion of providing some level of automation in the Nigerian voter registration exercise nation-wide. It provided, on time, the voter data capture system: laptops, appropriate software, stand-alone webcams connected to the laptops, biometric sensors (fingerprint), voter card printers, sufficiently skilled manpower to operate the systems from the NYSC and some level of voter education. The time given for the pieces of ICT equipment required to carry out the voter registration to be assembled was so short that it seemed impossible. However, our selected member companies like Zinox Technologies did us all proud. Although people may not remember this and give it all the kudos it deserves. That feat was a great contribution to the growth and sustenance of the Nigerian democracy. Don’t forget, the same voter used the same ICT facilities during the elections for voter accreditation to avoid multiple voting either in one station or in multiple stations.

Second, the industry witnessed the creation of a federal ministry with a full Minister to superintend over it. We witnessed the coming together, under one umbrella ministry, of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) which was hitherto in the erstwhile ministry of Information and Communications on one hand and, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited (NigComSat) and Galaxy Backbone Plc which were in the ministry Science and Technology, on the other. The Presidency deserves commendation for bringing these ICT-centric agencies of government into one ministry for effective planning, coordination, supervision, management and assessment of our national ICT growth and development.

Third, the increase in landing points and expansion into the hinterland of fibre optic cables that have arrived the shores of Nigeria in the last two years. We commend the efforts of MainOne and Glo-One in this regard. They are partnering with other broadband infrastructure providers to ensure rapid broadband infrastructure penetration of all cities, towns, villages, homes and offices in Nigeria. We are just starting in terms of broadband infrastructure provisioning in Nigeria. Since we are heading in the right direction we will eventually get there; I mean broadband in its ubiquity. However the speed of broadband infrastructure rollout is not high enough. Due to issues of Awareness, Access, Availability and Affordability broadband has not yet become a revolution. The day it is accelerated via proper Awareness campaigns and popularization what we are witnessing in the voice revolution will be a child’s play.

Fourth, the launching of Nigcommsat-1R with C-band, Ku-band, Ka-band and L-band constitutes a very excellent augury for the future broadband in Nigeria. The platforms so provided by NigCommsat will boost productivity in the telecoms, broadcasting, Internet service provisioning, value-added application, office, home and industrial tele-automation, national security, education, health, agriculture, entertainment, government, transportation and hospitality sub-sectors. Partnership and collaboration between the fibre optic-based broadband service or infrastructure providers are strongly recommended. When broadband infrastructure builders and service providers as well as content providers partner, synergize and collaborate, we will see quantum leaps in productivity across the entire landscape of the Nigerian economy. The contributions of broadband to national growth and development are by far more than the narrowband voice that we seem to dwell on in celebration.

Fifth, preparations are on top gear by the ICT industry to provide an efficient, secure, safe, accessible, available and affordable platform for the take-off of our cashless economy with effect from 2012. We commend the efforts of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), NCC and the relevant industry associations and stakeholders in this regard. This will call for secure terminals at points of sales (POS) and points of transactions (POT) in a web of secure and seamless telecom transport via switching centres to banks and other relevant financial institutions with a lot of value added software applications therein across the country.

Sixth, the institutionalization of SIM card registration processes as a would-be subscriber buys a new SIM card is a resounding accomplishment. I commend the Presidency, the National Assembly, the Nigerian Communications Commission, the telecom operators, the industry associations and the entire Nigerian telecom consumer public for this great feat. It is good for national security. It is good for criminal investigations. It is good for telecom data analyses for growth and development assessment. I commend the Association of Telecom Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) for having fought   a good fight that has eventually resulted in SIM card registration as we have it today. I was privileged to serve as National President of ATCON at the time of the advocacy for SIM card registration.

The media was the first to support our call. The office of the National Security Adviser (NSA), the Inspector General of Police (IGP), the National Assembly (both Houses) and late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua did not waste time to give us support. I had these feelings that they had been wondering what to do in the light of the rising use of mobile phones by kidnappers, armed robbers, hired assassins, 419ners and so on to commit crimes until we, the professionals, made the clarion call.

However, we did not hold the national ICT event of e-Nigeria in 2011. This was a huge setback. With the launch of the National ICT policy in last year’s e-Nigeria, we were expecting to have sector by sector ICT report, state by state ICT report, agency by agency ICT report, MDA by MDA ICT report, our broadband preparedness and situation report, industry response plans, strategies and tactics, etc in the e-Nigeria of 2011. It did not hold for reasons we do not know.

We no longer have the Nigerian Telecom Summit, which used to hold at the initial stages of the Nigerian telecom revolution. It ceased.  We used have AfriNet. It ceased. e-Nigeria was sustained till this year. We hope that it has not ceased. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World event took place this year in Geneva. Which is our national event platform to discuss and articulate positions on ICT development? Now that NCC, NITDA, NigComSat and Galaxy Backbone are in one ministry, the time has come for a major annual event in Nigeria that addresses ICT development in our country. We must ask ourselves yearly: where are we? How current are the policies? Where are we heading? Which are our goals? What are our success factors? What are our success indicators? Where are we within the ECOWAS sub-region, in Africa and globally? What are our time frames for accomplishing earmarked tasks? How fast is each sector of the economy being impacted positively by ICT?  Are we sufficiently boosting productivity in the economy with ICT as tool? The questions are many. It is in this area that is the absence in 2011 of a veritable national ICT event platform like e-Nigeria, organized by the key ICT agencies of government, to address these issues and put our country on a path to rapid economic development and transformation that I score our industry very low.

Several complaints greeted telecoms services in the last 365 days and operators have been blamed for not doing much in this area. What is your take on Quality of Service in the country?

For any telecom operator, quality of service is a commercial imperative if you want to retain your subscribers as well as grow your subscriber base. A satisfied subscriber is your unpaid marketer and an unhappy one de-markets you. So an operator ignores cries about poor quality of service at his own peril.

However, there are two sides to this issue. If I want to concentrate on my core telecom business; then I face Access, Switching and Billing. I should assume Transport. In other words, I should assume that large transmission facilities are in place for me to transport my traffic. I don’t have to bother about security, electricity at each cell site, free access to site for routine maintenance, easy right of way to roll out my access network, etc. In Nigeria, I am sorry to say, all these assumptions are false. You, as an operator, you have to provide a whole gamut of these facilities. You face multiple taxation. Even Local Government officials would demand one form of revenue or the other from you. You see, between the calling and called parties in a seamless telecom network you have many nodes and media, all of which are powered by electricity. Should PHCN power fail, what happens to the call? It drops of course. Whose fault? So the operator grapples with of many problems and faces many hurdles in his or her telecom service delivery. However, the other part of the coin consists of scramble for subscribers by operators, which shows itself in bringing onboard far more subscribers that a network capacity can cope with.

So, the scrambles lead to biting more than the network capacity can chew. Another is an insufficient switching node in the network. The higher the density of switches the freer the transport facilities are in capacity for long haul traffic.

A simple analogy is this: the door to this boardroom can only pass one person at a time. If I want 10 persons to pass through that door to pick gold or diamond (revenue) for me, then I must increase the width of the door to take 10 persons. If I don’t, then there will be congestion at the door in the scramble to get in to pick gold or diamond. So discipline is required on the part of the operators, in the injection of new subscribers into their networks.

Creating more dissatisfied subscribers is bad business! Having very satisfied manageable number of subscribers is good business. I know that my recommendation may not hold water in the highly competitive telecom marketplace. However, they need to strike a balance. We must also be aware of the fact that the telecom industry is growing. The operators are steadily increasing capacity as their subscribers’ bases increase. We have not yet reached a saturation point. With steady increase in capacity, broadband infrastructure penetration to off-load bandwidth-intensive data from legacy cellular networks, subscriber base stabilization, number portability and regulator close monitoring, we are heading to a state of steady high quality of service. The total Quality of Experience will be superb. I must say that excessive promos generate capacity congesting spikes in the network.