Guardian

I STILL recall my excitement about five years ago, when my organization just started consulting for a firm that was in the process of laying massive under-sea fiber-optic cables from Europe to the shores of Lagos. The company was striving to facilitate and enrich communication between Nigeria and the rest of the world by means of broadband internet. Alongside my colleagues, we dreamed of the future, which this phenomenal development portended for Nigeria. First, it would crash the cost of broadband internet, which remains significantly high in Nigeria. Secondly, it would help to enrich the broadband internet experience and naturally drive the expansion of its scope of use. In excitement, we imagined the empowerment it would help to unleash across this country of naturally entrepreneurial people. We were enthused by the enhanced productivity it would naturally spark off in the economy and how this would ultimately reflect in growth and development.

On its part, the under-sea cable firm did not dither for one day. It diligently laid the cables over the more than 7,000 kilometers that separate our shores from Europe’s and landed the cables in Nigeria as scheduled. Incidentally in between that initial landing of the under-sea cables on our shores and now, at least two other cross-continental sub-marine fiber-optic cables laden with humongous broadband internet capacity, have similarly berthed on our shores.

Alas, many years after the landing of these promising cross-continental fiber-optic cables, Nigeria has recorded only negligible progress in the areas of broadband internet availability, cost reduction and value derivation. While enormous quantities of broadband are lying idle on Nigeria’s shores, we are told that we cannot fully optimize the benefit of such internet availability because the country lacks the requisite infrastructure with which to transport the broadband internet from the shores into the hinterlands for end-users such as government, homes and businesses. In many other developing countries, major cities have been painstakingly crisscrossed by metropolitan fiber-optic transmission networks, a concept known in many circles as “connected cities” or “smart cities.” Johannesburg in South Africa is one such connected city and it is interesting to see the creative uses to which people in that city are putting broadband internet.

That none of Nigeria’s cities is a “connected” or “smart” city, is but a reflection of the problems and constraints of the ICT sector in what ought to naturally be Africa’s biggest and most productive market: The challenge of inadequate or even inexistent infrastructure.

It is that challenge that operators in the telephony and wider ICT industry have to live with, from one day into the next. Telecom operators still must grapple with the power challenge and install at least two electricity-generating plants in practically every site in which they have installations. Such operators must also grapple with the daily increasing difficulties of installing new infrastructure in a terrain where government bureaucracy has become overwhelmingly tedious if not outright rent seeking. Amidst this huge constraint of government bureaucracy and the growing tendency for practically every organ and agency of government from the local government to the federal level to “regulate” the telecom industry, even where funds are available, erecting the requisite telecom infrastructure in-country can only proceed at a certain slow pace. Where years ago, a radio base transceiver station (or base station in common parlance) could be erected and deployed in two to three weeks, today that process could drag on for upwards of six months.

Compounding this scenario is the seemingly never waning demand for telecom services. It is the inability of the four major telecom providers to consistently meet this surging demand that reflects in regular bouts of poor service quality across all the networks. The networks are simply unable to match surging subscriber numbers with the requisite level of infrastructure.

It is true, unfortunately, that in the quest to retain customers and perhaps attract prospective ones, the telecom operators often tend to worsen this problem by over-burdening their already fragile networks with consumer promos which create additional demand and further degrade service quality.

The point to be noted, however, is that fundamental to the quality of service debacle is the dearth of infrastructure across our country. Considerable work has been done by the telecom companies with regard to beefing up infrastructure, with a handful of these companies erecting country-wide transmission/backhaul facilities and erecting or participating in consortia that have erected cross-continental fiber optic cables. But the real imperative of building country infrastructure lies squarely at the doorstep of our governments. As one business executive once said, no economy can realistically expect to grow on the back of 2KVA and 5KVA generators. The negative effects of our infrastructure deficiency reflect in sundry aspects of our lives and we must consistently challenge our governments to action.

Incidentally, rather than spark off a call to action among our people, poor quality of telecom services typically evokes emotional responses that are often directed at the telecom operators and the industry regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC. Not a few people have since formed the impression that poor service quality is a function of laissez faire network deployment by operators only keen on profiting from the environment at the expense of everything else. They forget that telecom companies are businesses whose first imperative is to be operational. For only when you are operational can you make money and be profitable. How do you make money if customers are unable to make voice or data transactions on your network? And if all the networks are encountering the same problem of quality, then it must suggest that there certainly is a more fundamental problem at the background.

My hunch tells me that the NCC understands these issues very well. It understands that the problem of the telecom industry is squarely an infrastructural one, namely inadequate capacity in the face of surging demand. In the past when it tried to explain these issues to the Nigerian public the NCC got a bloodied nose. The public accused it of being tolerant, and indeed, defensive of the shortcomings of operators.

These days, therefore, the NCC strives to be seen as playing an active enforcer role. Not long ago, it imposed a series of fines on operators for not meeting certain service quality parameters. It was heavily applauded by the public for imposing those fines which many saw as punitive and atonement of sorts for the inconvenience and distress the telecom companies had apparently subjected millions of Nigeria’s telecom subscribers to, on account of poor quality of service.

Recently, it has launched mobile number portability, MNP a scheme that empowers subscribers to migrate from one operator to another, should the need arise, even while retaining their numbers. Unfortunately, MNP appears to have been sold to subscribers as the ultimate elixir of sorts, the scheme that will eliminate poor quality of service in the telecom industry. But this is farcical. MNP will not eliminate poor quality of service, as Nigerians will come to realize in due course.

The networks all publicly claim to have the requisite amount of resilience to accommodate the occasional surges in subscriber numbers that MNP may theoretically warrant. But imagine a situation, for instance, where one of the networks is down for a considerable period of time in say Lagos leading to a scenario in which customers truly wish to change their networks. Is there any network that can accommodate as many as say two or even three million new subscribers overnight without buckling and creating the same quality problems that warranted the move in the first place? I would doubt that such a network exists.

There is considerable marketing over-activity and grandstanding at the moment by all of the telecom networks. This is understandable. Even though the prospects of MNP in inducing any real shift in the status quo are in my view, very limited, no operator would want to take chances. Indeed, I am told that so popular has the new slang, “port” become, riding on the popularity of an equally popular ad that had one actor migrate from one network to another, that it is quickly finding a place in the local lingo. So don’t be surprised if tomorrow someone tells you he has “ported” the funds to his bank account or that a spinster has finally “ported” a husband. What will become increasingly apparent over the next few months, however, when the hype peters out is that MNP is not the solution to the question of quality of service. It should deepen competition, no doubt, and help to enhance customer care by the telecom companies, which can be awful sometimes.

MNP is not an alternative to the systematic assessment and commitment to painstaking overhauling, building and maintenance of critical country infrastructure and its associated processes. Thankfully, work appears to be progressing steadily in the area of the power sector reforms and there is hope of some form of power adequacy in some years to come. Nigeria’s ICT infrastructure would benefit from such a transformational agenda. So would our road and transportation infrastructure. It is when these begin to happen at substantial levels that Nigerians will see the desired quantum and quality of service not only in the telecom and larger ICT industry, but indeed in many other aspects of our lives. We all have a duty to hold our governments responsible to adequately positioning our country for the future by investing in country infrastructure.

Okoruwa works for XLR8, a communications management consultancy