allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Galaxy Backbone Initiative for Unlocking Wider Access to ICTs (Page 1 of 2)

Open access is a term used in several different ways and means different things to different people. In Nigeria like other developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa it could easily mean the right combination of policy, regulatory, business ad technical elements that serve to create wider access to information and communication technology (ICT) for the critical purpose of development.

What is the relevance of wider access to ICT in the quest for development?

The tools of ICT have the capacity to make information and services more widely available thus improving the life chances of the poorest in society. In Nigeria and Africa-these are majority of the people-over 60% of Nigerians live below $1 a day. In order for these tools to be successfully used, all those involved in development require information and communication that are accessible, cheap and widely available, particularly in the poorer and harder-to-reach rural areas.

In a study conducted on the specific open access strategy of improving backbone access in sub-Saharan Africa certain core values were identified as critical to an Open Access approach:

-A technology-neutral framework (that encourages innovative and low-cost delivery to users)

-Competition at all layers in the IP network (allowing a wide variety of physical networks and applications to interact in an open architecture);

-Transparency to ensure fair trading within and beyond layers (that allows clear, comparative information on market prices and services);

-The circumstances where everyone can connect to everyone else at the layer interface (so that any size of organisation can enter the market and no one takes a position of dominant market power);

-Devolved local solutions rather than centralised ones (encouraging services that are closer to the user)

Galaxy Backbone's Mandate

Galaxy Backbone was established to provide a common platform for connectivity for Federal Government of Nigeria, Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). In addition, it is expected to leverage jointly-funded infrastructure to create and operate a national backbone with a responsibility to reach underserved areas and support various Government reforms. By extension, the responsibility for a cost effective and available platform to provide an ICT interface with Government was conferred on it.

A key reason why the Federal Government made the investment in Galaxy Backbone was due to an apparent failure of the local market in rapidly driving penetration of connectivity into rural and underserved areas. Thus the objective is to drive penetration and drop costs with the higher objectives of increasing adoption and proliferation of services.

Reaching Underserved Communities by Leveraging Jointly-Funded Infrastructure

In fulfilling its mandate to directly reach under-serviced communities, Galaxy Backbone is pursuing the key strategy of attracting and leveraging jointly-funded (government, private sector and international donor agencies) infrastructure to deliver backbone connectivity and data centre infrastructure. Galaxy Backbone has almost concluded two major projects- NICEP, NICTIB. Both projects will deliver a 5000 node VSAT network across Nigeria and a national data centre and fibre-optic metropolitan area network in the FCT interconnecting all FGN MDAs. This strategy directly addresses one key area that limits Open Access strategies which is 'market failure' -where in a nutshell services and infrastructure is unavailable to the bottom of the pyramid users. At this level, simpler more basic services can be provided at cheaper and less complex means to a larger number of people and the tremendous volumes adequately leveraged to achieve fortunes- which in turn can positively affect cost of service delivery downwards.

This is particularly critical because even though effective operation of open access models is often dependent on liberalisation of markets, the market is sometimes handicapped (based on the traditional motives of profit revenue and growth) in areas when business cases cannot be supported-like rural communities with low income groups. This renders them under-serviced as ICT services can only be extended to those at the bottom of the income pyramid by lowering the cost of services and consequently placing business objectives at significant risk of not been attained.

Galaxy Backbone bridges this situation by creating the framework for providing partly funded infrastructure and incentivising the roll out of services to these areas.

Pursuing a 'Platform Play' Strategy to Create Innovation, Competition and Value

Given is origins and mandate, Galaxy Backbone plans to and is well able to pursue a 'platform play' type strategy both technically and commercially:

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine

Relevant Links

Relevant Links

Business

at a Glance

Today's Most Active Stories