The advent of the internet has in many ways levelled the playing field for small businesses to compete with major corporations. The internet has allowed fledging businesses to increase both visibility and revenue, reaching an unprecedented level in history. While the telecom service providers are pushing for an increase in the cost of the service on the ground that they charge far below their actual cost of their services, stakeholders in the industry have disagreed with them.
By Emmanuel Elebeke
The advent of the internet has in many ways levelled the playing field for small businesses to compete with major corporations. The internet has allowed fledging businesses to increase both visibility and revenue, reaching an unprecedented level in history. While the telecom service providers are pushing for an increase in the cost of the service on the ground that they charge far below their actual cost of their services, stakeholders in the industry have disagreed with them.
The stakeholders said telcos are required to localize their service and increase traffic on their networks.
National President of The Nigeria Association of Information Technology Enabled Outsourcing Companies, NAITEOC, Mr. David Onu, who spoke to Hi-Tech said, operators should be thinking of how to localize their services and increasing the traffic in their networks.
For him, the reason internet is expensive in Nigeria is because most people use the internet basically for social media or email purposes
”Most of the emails in Nigeria are on servers accessed from outside the country. A business owner who understands the benefits of utilizing the internet when conducting his business and applies the practices can maximize the potential of his organization.
”The internet itself is as useful as the applications that run on it.”
It’s just like you are in Abuja and you want to send an mail to your friend in Abuja but it has to go through US or France first. But if we have tier-four data centres where Google, Yahoo and the likes can reside their content locally, there is enough fibre already laid in the country to make internet more affordable.
”If we connect the different networks that are already in Nigeria to different data centres across Nigeria and the content is localized, the cost of bandwidth will crash. This is because it is no longer going out before coming back, it is just going within.”
He therefore advocated that more content should be put on the internet and charged service providers to start localization of contents.
”Government and the private sector must work together. The internet millionaires and billionaires are not necessarily those who created the connectivity, it is those who have the applications like the Facebook, Twitter, etc which is where the value chain resides.
”We need to become more intentional and build more tier-III, tier-IV data centres. We also need to address every issue of security and redundancy that could be a danger for data. Once these companies discover that we have these things in place, they will bring their content. There is need for partnership between government and the private sector
”Other countries of the world have made bandwidth available, affordable and sustainable and we can do the same in Nigeria. It is just about being more intentional about it,” he added.
