40% of rural Nigeria without network coverage, says FG

Though Nigeria boast of 117 active mobile subscriptions, 40 percent of the rural populace is still deprived of telecommunications service because there’s no network coverage, Omobola Johnson, minister of communications technology said in Lagos, weekend.

The minister, who spoke at an Information Communications Technology (ICT) Stakeholders Forum on ‘Connected for Growth-Moving from Planning to Execution’, lamented that while the number of global system for mobile (GSM) subscribers continues to witness phenomenal growth, the number of fixed connections have continued to decline. According to her, challenges in the operating environment were hindering operators from making requisite investments in network deployment.

“Connectivity is concentrated in urban, commercial areas: approximately 40 percent of rural areas have no mobile (network) coverage. While the number of mobile subscribers is increasing, fixed line subscribers have stagnated and fixed wireless declined,” she said. Omobola said the only way forward was to increase the spread and scope of communication infrastructure in the country. She urged the operators to look into exploring other communications technology infrastructure technologies across the country. She further admonished the telecoms operators to prioritise the roll-out of telecoms services to un-served and under-served areas so that the dividends of the telecoms revolution could get to all the nooks and crannies of the country.

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Though she said the number of base transmission stations (BTS) built by the operators have increased exponentially from 116 in 2001 to more than 21,000, the pace of growth has however fluctuated while existing BTS have been “decommissioned due to terror attacks, theft and vandalization.” She said for the persistent drop in the quality of telecoms service to abate, the country must have 60, 000 Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) by 2018. Though, the telecoms sector can currently boast of 26, 500 BTS, the government said this was not enough to meet the growing demands of about 160 million connected telephone users in the country and still increasing.

Johnson noted that investment in the telecoms sector is hampered by increasing incidences of spurious taxes and levies requested by states, delays in obtaining approval to build base stations, request for N250 million ecology tax from operators to deploy BTS and the issue of operators waiting for six months for approval to deploy 300 BTS. Specifically, Johnson said higher set-up and operating costs; delays and opportunity costs; security challenges have become source of concern to the sector. According to her, there is need to deliver on the promises of the transformation agenda by addressing the challenges in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry and leveraging the opportunities here-in for socio-economic development.