Internet culture teaches us to be always nice and cautious while online - especially the first wired meet, which may last several months of e-mail exchanges. The inspiring thing is that you never know how knowledge loaded your counterpart on the other side of the network may be. Neither should one get too emotional - after all, it is gradually becoming a "knowledge everywhere" world. I met 'R' (his Internet signature) Roland Alden on the net many months ago through a friend. And before I know it, he was routed to Nigeria to trouble shoot Telecoms bugs for a service provider. No sooner than he landed that the wireless bug with forest antenna which has almost defaced our country caught his attention and ever since, this has become our online pass time.

His company Marcom International Inc has been delivering satellite services and solutions for the past 15 years. Over the years, I have been personally troubled and concerned about our seeming attitude of neglect to such life important attitudes as Telecommunications. It has become crestal clear that we have refused to learn from our past mistakes not to speak of that of learning from others past mistakes.

Today, we all sink Water Boreholes and mount our water tanks as if that is the final destination. Indeed, no one seems to be thinking of mass water supply project and services - indicating that we may as a nation, have settled to live with hanging water tanks forever - amidst the population surge. Same applies to the state of our power supply - where power_generating sets have become a way of life amidst the shipyard_like noise that continues to terrorise and pollute our national psyche and environment. This generator makeshift trend may as well continue to hunt the nation for a major part of this century if care is not taken.

Without much ado, we may here and now invent the following equation: "Water Tanks = Generators = Telecoms Antennas = Abandoned national responsibility = under_development in three key development strategic areas (namely, Water for life, Energy for productivity and communications for competitiveness and national security).

Due to the revolutionary nature of IT and the opportunities it presents for every nation of the world, the fundamental issue of laying a solid foundation for the emerging Information Society should be a high priority concern to all stake holders - indeed for every one. The forest of antennas in our nation should indeed spur us to organise a national debate on the subject of Wired or Wireless Networks, which way Nigeria? For the Moment, are we thinking of Co-Location of antennas? The following is the opinion of my friend Roland, based on his first encounter with the Nigerian Skyline.

"The most important distinction between fiber and satellite circuits is the service footprint that one creates in building out the infrastructure.

Satellite circuits create service at, at most, two points. Since one point is invariably already served (such as a teleport) in practice a satellite circuit only enables one point. The cost of the technology is entirely amortized over service(s) delivered to a single location. Thus, to be useful that location must be either 1) very important, or 2) that satellite earth station must be coupled to another distribution technology (such as a terristrial wireless or fiber network) in order for the costly service to be made available to enough endpoints to justify the investment.

A fiber network creates a much bigger "service footprint" for several reasons:

1. While a fiber optic cable does not deliver service to every centimeter of distance it traverses along its terrestrial route (it delivers service to only those points where the fiber is terminated and appropriate electronics can express service out of the cable), the construction of a fiber network does impact the local economies along its route in a more or less continuous stream of capital investment dollars distributed linearly along the route.

2. Furthermore, because the lightwaves/signals in the fiber must be regenerated at periodic intervals there will be a number of points along relatively long routes where the fiber must be interrupted and electronics applied to express and regenerate the signal. At these points the marginal cost of delivering service to the immediate vicinity (or an intersecting "lateral" cable which would carry service off_route) is approximately $0.

3. Just as satellites expend a great deal of capital and technology to propel their signals across great distances (they must transmit signals across space from a minimum of 100's of miles up to 22,000 for commonly used geo_synchronous satellites). So too can expensive electronics be used to transmit signals through fiber optic cables great distances without requiring the cable run to be interrupted. Thus it is possible to build a fiber network which traverses many hundreds of kilometers between service points. However, while satellite networks must adopt this approach fiber networks need not.

Indeed, for any transmission technology, the greater the distance between service points, the higher the cost of the electronics needed to propel the signals. For fiber networks the inverse is also true: the more points along the fiber route where service is offered, the lower the cost of the electronics needed to generate the transmission signals.

4. For many network construction projects a particular route is constructed in order to serve a specific customer located at the end of that route. Network construction is viewed entirely as a cost of serving that customer and the lowest cost means of accomplishing that goal typically dictate the network architecture."