Hamisu Muhammad
3 May 2009
Although high telephone charges are beginning to come down world over, Nigerians still suffers from relatively high telephony costs, a World Bank report has said.
The report which was released last week said in the area of telecommunications cost, Nigeria does not appear to have a distinct advantage over its competitors.
According to the Bank's report the cost of a 3-minute fixed line phone call to the United State is one of the highest in the world. "More importantly perhaps the cost of a dedicated E1 line to the US remains high at $8,000 per month".
But the bank said that Nigeria is making great strides in the are as the price of a telephone call to the US has come down drastically from $7.15 per three minutes call in 2000 to less then $2 in 2005
The Bank recommended that policy makers must now address the business segment of the telephone market and continue to make progress on important telephone reforms such as the regulatory regim, interconnectivity issues, use of share infrastructure and quality of service especially in the mobile sector.
Meanwhile, the report said the use of the internet in Nigeria has started to take off recently but remains far behind leading competitors.
"But Nigeria lags behind many of its competitors in the availability of internet hosts and as a result, does not boast as many internet users as other countries
However, this situation is quickly improving.
"In 2006, Nigeria had 0.8 internet hosts per 10,000 people while the comparable figures for Malaysia and the Philippines were 35 and 4.8 respectively"
The bank said the access to broadband is highly desirable to curtail the problem.
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This is a very good observation by the World Bank, which has always been a cause of worry to me. The major problem is the that the Nigerian government rushed into the area of wireless telecommunications because it is cheaper and faster to establish than the traditional and more dependable wired Network. What they failed to realize is that apart from providing telephony etc). Wireless technology is relatively new, and it is still far behind its wired counterpart in terms of speed and reliability. The only advantage wireless has over wired line is the medium which is air. It has some limitations in the area of data transfer (internet connectivity, fax service and many more). The Internet communication is based on the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS); therefore, for Nigerians to fully utilize the Internet, this telephone system (wired lines) must be fully developed.
Recently when I traveled to Nigeria, I could not send to important documents to my office in the United States because the band width of the four cybercafés I visited was too small to even log into my e-mail account, how much less sending an attachment. When I decided to do it through fax service, that became a problem too because all the business centers were operating on wireless (they said that Nitel was dead). This is an example of one of the limitations I earlier pointed out. The problem is that the café operators rely on t Very Small Aperture Terminal (V-SAT), a wireless service through satellite, for their connectivity. The fact is that connection by satellite is too expensive for them to be able to buy enough bandwidth from the Service Providers.
The Nigerian government should, as a matter of urgency do every possible to develop the land telephone system in Nigeria because the backbone of telecommunication in any country is the land telephone system but not wireless line network. It is only by so doing that Nigerians should be able to get high speed internet connections right in their homes at a very cheap rate. Businesses too, such as cybercafés will be able to provide quality services to their customers.