As MTN Nigeria prepares to go-live on the West African Cable System (WACS), a 14,000 kilometres fibre optic submarine cable with a capacity of 5.12 terabits per second (tbps), which berthed in the country last year, the expectation that Nigeria e-commerce and emergence as a digital economy may have to wait until the issue of carrying bandwidth traffic to the hinterlands is addressed.
The WACS consortium include MTN, Angola Cables, Broadband Infraco, Cable and Wireless Worldwide; Congo Telecom.; Société Congolaise des Postes et Télécommunications (“SCPT”), PT Communicacoes, Togo Telecom, Tata Communications, Telecom Namibia, Telkom SA Ltd, and Vodacom Group Ltd. WACS which cost about $650 million spans the entire West African coast and terminating in the United Kingdom.
The cable would enable seamless connectivity among Southern and West Africa countries with the rest of Europe and America. It has 15 established terminal stations along its route and would function to reduce the cost to connect the West coast of Africa into the high-speed global telecommunications network. MTN is the single biggest investor in WACS with over $90 million in the cable.
Mr. Wale Goodluck, corporate Services Executive, MTN Nigeria said, “The WACS cable is here. It landed in the middle of last year. The landing station is ready and we expect that it should be carrying live traffic by the end of April. The capacity is bigger than any submarine cable that has landed in Nigeria and we expect that it would provide greater bandwidth, greater redundancy and for more latency for data services.”
However, landing the cable on the shore of the beach is just the beginning. “We need to take it up country. The federal, state and local government needs to support the industry with Rights of Way and give us conducive environment to enable us put infrastructure in the ground,” Goodluck said. MTN Nigeria plans to invest $1.3 billion into its core, radio and the transmission networks and build more national and metropolitan fibre rings.
To get this done, it needs free or easy access. But the company faces the difficulty in taking the cable into the hinterland. Issues of Rights of Way permits, multiple taxations from all levels of government, vandalisation of cables by construction companies building roads, etc are obstructing the delivery of bandwidth to the hinterlands.
Mr. Okey Itanyi, Executive Commissioner Stakeholder Management, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), said that MTN and other telecom operators are now seen as an palying in the extractive industry and should pay all the taxes, levies and duties imposed on them by the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) at the federal, states and local governments levels. He said the multiple taxations which is in tens of billions of naira for each operator may affect the plans by operators to crash the cost of bandwidth especially in the semi urban and rural ears
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